'Keeping a clear head?'
'New Year's Resolution.'
'I haven't thought of any yet. Well...maybe one.'
'And that's a secret, I suppose?'
'Oh, yes, they don't work if you blab about them.'
'That's why mine never work then.'
I watched out of the corner of my eye as he scoffed down all the calamares until there was only one left. He then performed the same trick.
'Try one of these, they're fantastic.'
I took the ring from his extended fork and I thought: I quite like being fed, and I remembered for some reason the plastic bags dancing on the wind.
'I was surprised when you just left this morning,' I said.
'Did you think you were ever going to see me again?'
'I thought you were Don Juan, or, what's his name, the character in the mask from V for Vendetta?'
'I never saw it.' He shrugged. 'Do you like masks?'
I was surprised by the question and wasn't sure whether or not to tell the truth. 'Yes,' I said finally. 'They allow you to be yourself.'
'Now I understand why surgeons are surgeons,' he said. He smiled. 'I always have breakfast New Year's Day with my sister and parents. It's a tradition. I had to race up to Richmond...'
'What if you hadn't forgotten your phone?'
'Well, I knew the address, and maybe I did leave it on purpose.' He produced the phone from his pocket.
'What's your surname?'
'I beg your pardon?'
He looked up and grinned. 'I only looked at the cards, not the envelopes in the wastepaper basket.'
'You were tempted though?'
He nodded. 'You got me.' He was holding the phone in his palm and tapped in some letters. 'Katie?' he said, and looked up expectantly.
'Boyd,' I replied. 'With a y.'
I watched him watch the spinning disc, then his brow went up. 'You're famous,' he declared, his eyes shiny as he looked back across the table.
I looked away, then back again. 'Just industrious,' I returned. 'FaceBook, Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, you name it, I'm on it.'
I'd lost him to the pull of the iPhone. The virus. Tap, tap, tap. He started reading to himself, looked back at me, then continued reading again.
'You've done heaps of interviews.'
'If you read them they're all different. I never say the same thing twice.'
'That makes you sound more interesting.'
'More interesting than I really am.'
'You do know, when someone says they are not interesting, it immediately makes them sound more interesting.'
'But it's true.'
He leaned forward across the table and took my hand, as if I needed reassurance. 'I don't believe that for one minute. Three books...'
'In five years.'
'It says here you live in Chelsea.'
'I lied.'
'Moved, I think you mean.'
'I decided to amount to something – in spite of my advantages.'
'I imagine East London's more inspirational?'
'The rents are cheaper,' I said, and he smiled, his teeth a gleaming arc against the darkness of his tan. 'I'm totally jealous of your tan. You look so healthy.'
'I get to swim every day, the sea's incredible...'
'Alright, alright, you made your point.'
He drained his beer. 'You haven't eaten very much,' he said.
'I had a huge breakfast.'
He finished the last albóndigas and wiped the dish clean with a piece of bread. He then took my right hand and unwound the blue tape. Like my doctor, he moved the little finger on its axis, the motion gentle but firm, the way he made love, and the memory film that flashed through my head brought the colour to my cheeks.
'It's what we call a boxer's fracture. The neck of the metacarpal bone has a hairline crack. You didn't punch anybody, did you?'
'Yes, my hand, on the ground.'
'You must have gone down with some force,' he said, his voice gentle, caring. 'It will get better.'
As he was reapplying the tape to my finger the waiter came.
'Algo más? Café, torta de almendra?'
'No, gracias. La cuenta.'
'No coffee? Tom asked.
'Not here,' I replied. 'Do you have plans? Are you dashing off?'
'If I had plans, Katie Boyd, I would cancel them.'
4
SNAP
Mother used to partner Peter Drew, from Drew Butler, the estate agent in Canterbury, when they played bridge in local tournaments. As they both have that killer instinct, they won every title that was going. Canterbury, the ancient city of Thomas Becket and Chaucer, is a short drive from our country house, and less than an hour from the coast, where I went to school in Broadstairs.
That unusually hot summer when I finished my exams, I planned to pass my days sunning in the garden reading novels, my nights drifting in and out of the student bars where there was live music, an air of anticipation and no holy sisters monitoring my every move, a fixation that began after an encounter with Bella in the showers.
Bella had been 'sent down,' a brilliant start to her musical career, and I had passed through the high gates of Saint Sebastian's with but one cloud in the sky. During the holidays, I always saw Simon Wells, who had thought of me as his girlfriend since that time when he slashed our thumbs with a penknife and mingled our blood with an oath of undying devotion, which I, at fourteen, never took seriously, even if he did. At Easter, after the last of his many battles in the war to remove my knickers, I had pledged to stop being 'a cock teaser,' as he put it, and allow his groping to take its conventional course. It seems astonishing, looking back, that at eighteen I was still intacta, a state I was anxious to rectify, although not necessarily with Simon Wells.
When we were nine and my brother was five, Simon locked Matt in the garden shed. Matt almost choked to death with an asthma attack and the memory of my brother's face turning purple as he gasped for breath always slipped into my mind as Simon's hands slipped into my clothes. Simon was late returning home that summer, he was retaking exams, but his emails, as if driven by a monomania, never failed to allude to my 'promise.'
I wasn't retaking exams. I had worked that last school year like a medieval scribe copying the Bible. I waited each morning for the post to see whether I had earned a place at Cambridge, an experience that had tied my tummy in knots, and spent my afternoons trying to relax on the sun-bed reading Yann Martel's perfectly silly Life of Pi. When it struck Mother that the gardener had butchered the hanging roses while gaping through the trellis at me in my yellow bikini, the tic on her temple began to dance and, when the gardener had finished for the day, she flew into a rage. She couldn't remove the gardener from the garden; they are as rare as ambergris in rural Kent, and decided to remove me instead.
'You've become such a little show off,' she began. 'Flaunting yourself.'
'I do recall you lying in the garden sunbathing, Mother.'
'What I do or do not do is none of your business. Hanging around doing nothing, with nothing on, wasting your time...'
'I've just finished my exams. I worked bloody hard...'
'Don't you dare use that language with me. You need a summer job, that's what girls do.'
I swallowed hard. My mouth had gone dry. 'A job?'
'You need...what's it called, work experience...'
'Like you'd know?'
'Katie, we live in different times. You have to find your niche...'
'Isn't a niche where they put dead people?'
She was about to continue but stopped herself. A smile came to her thin lips; she had once brought up the subject of Botox, and left the room with her fast step and usual determination. She spoke on the telephone for several minutes. I heard her voice rise and then she returned with that look people have when they fill in the last answer on a crossword puzzle.
[Crafty plot to arouse curiosity? 8 Letters.]
She had spoken to her bridge partner and arranged for me
to work for a month as an intern in the office at Drew Butler. My heart dropped and I knew, knowing Mother, that she had, not one, but myriad motives in removing me from the earthy pleasures of the garden: the gardener's enjoyment at being in close proximity to a near naked girl and the near naked girl's fascination in being surreptitiously observed through the hanging roses.
Mother adored being at the heart of an intrigue, that 8 letter word, and made herself believe the whole world had an interest in her secrets. She was a beautiful woman crossing that trembling bridge from forty to fifty and needed, more than ever, to be admired; she dreamed of hand-written letters to tie in ribbon, and rushed on clicking heels to the door when the bell rang, as if expecting the florist with a dozen long-stemmed roses. When I was small and she made the occasional dash to Broadstairs to take me out for afternoon tea, she adored showing me off in my scarlet blazer and straw boater, but as my legs grew longer and my skirts got shorter, if the waiter fussed over me, it made her cross to even contemplate that she might be losing her life-long capacity to be the centre of attention.
Thus, the fling with Peter Drew, if that were the case, and curious that she would want to put me in his orbit, unless she were testing or tricking him in some way.
Before that particular summer, I had always been upset when my mother had a 'special friend,' but that promptly ended when Uncle Douglas showed me a photograph of Daddy with a young Chinese woman on the terrace at Raffles, the rather splendid colonial hotel in Singapore. As a writer, Douglas believes in show, not tell, and the nonchalant way in which he produced the photograph said a great deal more to me than the semi-truths compiled by his agent for Wikipedia.
My job started on a Monday. The gardener didn't work weekends. It gave the roses time to recover and me two long days in the sun without Mother bustling out every two minutes to make sure I hadn't taken off my top. Having to work was a 'negative,' and one thing the nuns at Saint Sebastian's taught was that we should, through the power of spiritual alchemy, turn every negative into a positive. I wasn't sure that the universe operated with such simplicity, but thought this might just be the answer to my prayers. As an intern at Drew Butler, I was not being paid, but had been promised a commission of a half of one percent if I sold a house – a sum that would amount to thousands of pounds and give me complete freedom at university.
My parents are not exactly impoverished, but belong to that generation that doesn't believe in mollycoddling their children – unlike my cousin Jayne, who has turned Guy, Daisy and Molly, aged six, four and three, into a fetish, with incessant Tweets, daily photographs on Facebook, and Christmas cards adorned with her offspring identically dressed and beaming with such boundless joy I am instantly reminded of pictures of African children with matchstick limbs and bloated empty bellies.
The first day in the office, I studied the property on the company books. Like all sensible people, Stuart Butler was on holiday, and I learned how to deal with clients accompanying Susanna Field, a plump chatty woman with school age children, on excursions to see various houses, none of which led to a sale.
Friday came, a scorching day, and I was dying for the weekend when I could climb back into my bikini and top up my tan. Susanna finished work at lunchtime. Mr Drew was locked in his cubby hole with a widow seeking advice on estate management when I noticed a man shading his eyes as he stared at me over the display of houses for sale in the window.
He finally entered the office, dropped his shoulder bag, and fixed his blue eyes on me with such intensity a flush raced over my neck. He was wearing jeans and a denim shirt with too many buttons undone, something not done in Canterbury. He stroked his hand through his hair.
'There's a house for sale, Black Spires, is it still available?' he asked, his voice clipped and edgy.
'Yes, I do believe it is.'
'I'd like to take a look, straight away, before I get the train back to London.'
I had come to my feet. 'Of course. I won't be a moment,' I replied.
I tapped on Mr Drew's door. Black Spires was a large country house outside the village of Wingham. It had been on the books, I'd been told, for a considerable time, and I assumed Mr Drew would want to deal with it himself. I tapped again.
'Yes,' he called, and I poked my head around the door.
'Someone wants to see Black Spires,' I explained. 'He wants to see it now...'
'Are you capable of dealing with this yourself, dear?' he asked and I felt my jaw stiffen with anxiety.
'I'll do my best.'
'Well, we can expect no more than that, now can we?'
His lips rose faintly and his companion turned in her chair. The widow, all in black with dark glasses, revealed long tanned legs in a short skirt and high heels in patent leather. She looked little older than me, like a senior girl when you are a junior, and had the reddest lips I had ever seen. Her expression seemed vaguely conspiratorial and, as she smiled, her eyebrows arched above the rim of her glasses.
'Well, off you go then,' Mr Drew continued, glancing at the widow. 'We happen to be rather busy.'
'Okay...' I was about to close the door.
'Wait,' he called, and produced a set of keys from a drawer. 'You won't get far without these, now will you? You do know where to go?'
'Yes, I do.'
'Be careful, there's a good girl.'
As I was closing the door, he looked back at his companion in a way that made it clear why Mother quizzed me about Mr Drew's clients when I got home each day from the office.
I rattled the keys and the man hauled his bag back on his shoulder. He stuck out his free hand. 'Roger Devlin,' he said.
'Katie Boyd.'
He held on to my hand for longer than was necessary and the way he stared into my eyes made my underarms tingle with a sudden rush of nerves.
'Right, off we go then. I don't have a lot of time,' he said, and let go of my hand.
He followed me across the road to the car park. We danced between the traffic, and he placed his bag on the back seat of the company's sky blue Mini, the reason why Mr Drew had cautioned me to 'be careful.' As I hooked into the seatbelt, I was conscious that the strap crossing my chest emphasised my breasts and my pink skirt, hemmed with flowers, revealed an awful lot of bare leg.
Not that Roger Devlin appeared to notice. He just stared out the side window as the road to Wingham curled between apple and pear orchards, the immense sky with its scattering of clouds and the fields stretching into the distance like a painting by Constable. Insects tapped against the windscreen. The traffic was light. I drove with care, but touched the kerb turning a tight corner.
'My God, what the hell do you think you're doing?'
'I'm sorry...'
'Sorry. You have passed your test, I assume? The insurance isn't valid if you haven't.'
'Yes, at Christmas, actually, six months ago.'
'It shows. How old are you?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You heard what I said.'
I took a breath. I was tempted not answer. I don't like being asked personal questions.
'Eighteen,' I said finally.
'That's all right, then.'
With his voice raised, I had caught the burr of an Irish accent softened by years in London, and his dark eyes below a mop of curly dark hair were as shiny as the black pearls on the necklace my grandmother wore. I was hot, my neck burning, and my back was wet against the car seat. I had forgotten my sunglasses and my eyes hurt straining against the strong light.
We passed a Saxon church with a flag hanging indolently on a pole, the flint of the walls gleaming like stars. I dropped a gear to climb Pedding Hill, and slowed behind two cyclists, a boy in front, a girl in a white dress behind him. She stood to get better traction and her dress blew up, showing her white knickers.
I became aware that my own skirt had risen over my thighs when he glanced at my legs levering the pedals. I kept my hands on the steering wheel, not daring to ease my skirt down, and he looked away with a fain
t shake of his head. The exchange of looks was momentary, but I missed the turn to Black Spires and had to double back. He tutted.
'You do know where you are going?'
'Yes, I just missed the turn, that's all.'
'I've got a train to catch.'
'We'll be there in a few minutes,' I said, and I could hear the desperation in my voice.
'That's alright, you're doing okay,' he replied, and tapped my leg just above the knee, the familiarity of his open palm on my bare flesh both shocking and, at the same time, a relief that his anger had subsided.
He opened the window and my hair tossed about my face. I slowed as the road narrowed and the humid smell of old trees and bushes entered the car. The lane was shaded between high hedgerows and I felt as if we had entered a tunnel that would take me, as the rabbit hole took Alice, somewhere completely unexpected. I had set out on the journey with the intention of charming my way into making that first sale. I had been ready to give up at the first hurdle, the first tap on the kerb, and now told myself that the way to deal with a bully and get what you want is to respond positively to their demands.
Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
It was one of Sister Theresa's pet phrases and I said those words to myself as Black Spires came into view. I turned with a smile.
'It's beautiful,' I said, and he nodded thoughtfully as he replied.
'Damn right,' he agreed, and we stepped out of the car.
He reached into the back for his bag, took out a camcorder and slowly panned the surroundings. He filmed the façade, leaning back to capture the slate spires; they were black, shiny as the widow's patent leather shoes. The house was a folly. It looked Gothic with its block stonework and arched windows, but had been built in Victorian times by a wealthy botanist who had walked across Borneo and amassed the world's largest collection of butterflies. I was rattling off the history as the eye of the camera paused on my face.
'I make up my mind whether or not I want something by taking pictures,' he said. 'Just pretend the camera's not there. Can you do that?'
'Yes, of course.'
'Photographs without people are usually dead. A figure puts the dimensions into perspective,' he added, and I nodded in agreement.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 4
