Rob was waiting by the fourth plinth. He wore tight jeans and a trim fitting blue shirt with a white collar, the sleeves rolled up to expose a little black Art Deco cat, tattooed on the inside of his forearm. His hair was tightly scraped back, but I could see it was the kind of curly that erupted into frizz whenever the air was moist. For a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but it had been a while since the last time we spoke, or the last time he’d spoken to Simon, and instead he just licked his lips and said, “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said, and my gaze drifted inevitably upwards, because a giant Assyrian God, a winged bull, currently occupied the plinth.
Rob turned to look with me. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he said. “Can you believe the whole thing’s made out of empty cans?”
“No. It’s very impressive.” I knew enough about the artist and the story behind it, but I was Simon today. “I don’t usually like modern art.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” said Rob.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what people say when they want to dismiss something straight off the bat. Like people who say they like all music, except for rap and country.”
I wanted to say I still loved me some Kanye, no matter how personally obnoxious he seemed, but Simon didn’t. “Would it make you feel any better if I said I was a huge Johnny Cash fan? Does he count as country?”
“Dead on,” said Rob, sizing me up. “What about Dolly?”
“Meh.”
He gave a small gasp. “Blasphemy.”
I nodded to the gallery steps. “Do you want to go in?”
We went in. As soon as we were inside the mosaic-tiled portico, we exhaled. The cool was immediate and wonderful.
“Good choice, by the way,” he said. “They have to keep it temperature controlled, on account of the paintings.”
“What shall we do? Do you want to do the short and lazy philistine tour, where we just look at all the famous ones?”
“No thanks. I want to linger.” He started off towards the rooms, giant boxes painted in shades of red and blue and green, each one a treasury in its own right. He gave me a shy smile. “Does it make me a philistine if I’m here for the air conditioning?”
“No. It makes you hot.”
I was quite proud of that one. It was a perfect Simon-style stumble into an accidental compliment. And Rob took it very sweetly. He blushed and said, “Thank you. You’re not so bad yourself,” before gingerly unfolding part of his gallery guide map. “Oh, I definitely want to see the Caravaggios, though.”
I almost mentioned Cupid with rickets, but that was too much Simon in one go. And rickets weren’t sexy. We made our way around the gallery – Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid, featuring the iconic Monty Python foot in the bottom left hand corner, Holbein’s Ambassadors, with its strange extruded skull illusion, the Rokeby Venus with her sinuous spine and magnificent bum.
Eventually we came to the Caravaggios. Rob lingered in front of a Salome being presented with the head of John the Baptist. “God, that’s dark,” he said.
No shit. It was a severed head on a plate. “When you say dark…”
“Yeah, I don’t just mean the chiaroscuro,” he said, and the Italian tripped off his tongue with a pleasing accent. “I mean, both. Both the subject and the execution.”
“Execution?”
“Bad choice of words,” he said, and wrinkled his nose at the painting. “Sorry, John.”
“She doesn’t look very happy about it, does she?” I said, glancing at Salome, who looked about as delighted as anyone would be when presented with a severed head. And John looked rather green around the gills, like he might have already started to stink up the place.
“No. That’s a real ‘Did not think that through’ expression, right there.”
I stifled a giggle. “That a ‘shit. Should have asked for a pony instead’ expression.”
“Really. Or a necklace. Something nice.”
“Well, she was very young at the time, and you know what teenagers are like. They can be very demanding. They want the latest phone, latest trainers, lip injections, hair extensions, piercings—”
“—rotting head of a prophet. Yeah. Plus ça change…” He giggled and moved closer to me. I felt his hand brush my wrist and it was the easiest thing in the world to let his fingers slip between the gaps in mine. His hand felt delicate, because his fingers were long, matching the rest of him. He wasn’t overly tall, but he was fine, with a willowy build, slender wrists and enviably small waist.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I thought you’d lost interest in me.”
“No, no – of course not. It’s just been hectic lately. My brother…”
“You have a brother?”
“Yes. Nathan.” Fuck it. No, I was going to tell him. As insurance against the outside possibility that I might take a stroll up the Kinsey Scale and date him myself. “We’re twins, actually.”
“Identical?”
“Only in appearance,” I said, as we moved away from the Caravaggios into a sea of Italian Madonnas – blue mantles and pink oval faces raised to heaven, as far as the eye could see. “We’re very different people. He had some drama with his landlord shoving him out the door and his flatmate pissing off to Spain, so he had to move in with me for the time being.”
Rob made sympathetic noises. “Ugh. It’s such a nightmare trying to afford anything in London. I was so lucky I had the opportunity to buy when I did.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Chelsea.”
I double-taked, and he laughed.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not one of the Made In Chelsea crowd. It’s a very small piece of real estate, and I only got it because an inheritance came my way. My sister went and spunked her share of the money on holidays and mascara, and now she makes ten times what I make – Instagramming vegan food and shilling that weird tea that gives you diarrhoea.” He peeked up at me. His eyelashes were blond. “What about your brother? Is he a doctor, too?”
“No. He’s an actor,” I said. “Total extrovert. Opposite of me.”
“Has he been in anything?”
“Oh, West End stuff,” I said. “Background work. I’m told it’s very hard to get a break.”
“Absolutely,” said Rob. “Anything with the arts. It’s cutthroat. When I was sixteen I told my school careers officer that I was going to write books, and her reaction was pretty much ‘Well, I hope you weren’t planning on making money from that.’”
“She sounds very unhelpful. I hope you proved her wrong.”
He scrunched his nose. “I…didn’t. I’ve been walking around ever since with this book in my head, but every time I try to put it down on the page it seems…flimsy. Not nearly as good as it is in my head, because in my head I think it might be wonderful, but as soon as I start writing it looks stilted. And stupid. Do you know what I mean?”
I did. Completely. I was strangely charmed to discover that writers had their own form of stage fright, but of course I was Simon. “No,” I said. “Can’t say I do.”
His hand slipped out of mine: it was getting sweaty, in spite of the air conditioning. “It must be weird,” he said. “Knowing there’s someone else walking around out there with your exact same DNA.” He gave another one of those soft gasps, like he had when I’d said I was lukewarm on Dolly Parton. “What if he committed a crime? Do you have the exact same fingerprints?”
“No,” I said, on safer, Simon-ground now. “Identical twins diverge almost immediately from the point of conception. Even before birth, we’re shaped by circumstances. Hormones from the mother act on the foetuses in utero, and not in a uniform way, so fingerprints grow differently. Birth weights can be starkly different. There’s even a theory that the influence of hormones in the womb can eventually determine the child’s sexuality, which is why you get twins who are genetically identical, but one is gay and the other is straight.”
“Wait,” he said, as we moved out of
the room, which was filling rapidly with an enormous party of bored schoolchildren. “Do you mean your brother is straight?”
“Yep.”
“Are you sure?”
“The enormous number of girlfriends would seem to suggest so, yes.”
Rob shook his head. “No. I thought it was genetic?”
“Obviously not. There have been studies on it – gay twin, straight twin. It happens. Actually we were approached by one of those studies, but Nathan wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Why?”
“Because he was worried the data could be used for anti-gay propaganda. Like people saying ‘It’s not genetic. You chose to be this way purely to enrage Daily Mail readers.’ I explained to him that data is data and how it’s used is not the problem, but he wouldn’t get involved.”
“Good for him,” said Rob, giving me an unexpected dose of the warm fuzzies. “And honestly? If it was about enraging Daily Mail readers? I’d double down on the dick.” He grinned, and his smile was white, his front teeth just a little too large. “That or he didn’t want to answer a bunch of awkward questions about his sex life.”
“What are you saying?” I said. “That my brother’s not all that straight?”
He was, by the way. Absolutely one hundred per cent heterosexual. Completely immune to the strange charms of adorable Bloomsbury booksellers.
“Might not be,” said Rob. “You have the exact same DNA and you’re gay. Who’s to say he’s not hiding something?”
“Well, there might have been some…experimentation,” I said. “At college. Perhaps.”
“What did he do at university?”
“Performing Arts.”
Rob let out a sea lion bark of laughter, startling a nearby curator. “Oh, then he’s definitely not that straight.”
“Isn’t that a stereotype?” I said. “Just because he works in the theatre doesn’t mean he’s gay. I’m gay and I hate the theatre. Especially musicals.”
“Yes, it’s a stereotype, but in my experience? The Performing Arts kids at any given university are like rabbits. No – more like bonobos, because they’re not fussy about little things like gender, so long as they’re getting boned. They usually stuck to their own clique, but occasionally they’d venture out and dip a toe into the English department.”
“And that was you, was it?” I said, as we wandered into a room dominated by a reclining god and goddess. “The English department?”
“Afraid so. Joint Honours, English and Drama, which is even more useless than it sounds, unless there’s ever an emergency that calls for someone who knows a lot about Molière in a hurry.”
I loved Molière. I’d played Tartuffe in my first year at Sussex, but of course I couldn’t say a thing. Again.
“Oh, is that a Botticelli?” said Rob, glancing at the reclining gods. “How beautiful.”
It was Botticelli, but I realised I’d been here before. It was the scene of another one of Simon’s upsetting medical stories, and I was Simon, after all. I lingered in front of a painting of a faun – like the ones from Narnia. It was weeping over the body of a dead nymph, while a depressed looking dog watched over them.
After a while, Rob took the hint and joined me. “How…cheerful,” he said, looking at the painting.
“She’s dead,” I said.
“Well, obviously.”
“No, I mean the model for that painting,” I said. “She was literally dead.”
He gave me an odd look. The kind of look I’d been giving Simon my whole life. Not to brag, but I was nailing this. “How can you tell that from a painting?” he said.
“You see her hand? The one nearest the ground? How it’s curled in on itself with the fingers pointing towards the wrist?”
“Yeah.”
“Surgeons call that the ‘waiter tip’, because it looks like a waiter taking a backhanded tip. The hand automatically curls into that position when there’s significant trauma to the C3 or C4 vertebrae…” I reached out and touched the nape of his neck. His hair felt like a cloud. “Right here. Definite spinal cord involvement, consistent with the wound in the model’s throat.”
Rob shivered and I lowered my hand. Maybe the touch was a bit too ghoulish.
“The most likely explanation is that the artist drew what he saw.”
“Jesus,” said Rob. “Are you saying he murdered her?”
“Well, that’s purely conjecture. But my initial thought was that she was a murder victim. And that the artist probably picked his model from a morgue.”
He wrapped protective hands around his neck and shuddered. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or distressed that you know that.”
“I’ve always been fascinated by forensics,” I said, and carried on in the same vein. “Apropos of something, have you ever had lunch in a crypt?”
We wandered on through the gallery, through Rococo and Romanticism, then onto Realism and Pre-Raphaelites, Fauves, Cubists and Impressionists – pre and post. “There’s too much to get through, really,” he said, against the backdrop of Rousseau’s Tiger In A Tropical Storm, all exotic blossoms and driving rain. “You need about three days to get around and appreciate all the paintings properly, and even then it’s impossible to take it all in. Kind of like the British Museum; after a while your brain starts to reject any more interesting things and starts craving some good old fashioned boredom.”
“Okay. You want me to bore you? Is that it?”
He laughed. “Oh, no. I’m fine. If things get too interesting I just gaze into the abyss of Kendall Jenner’s Instagram for ten minutes. It’s totally empty and the perfect palate cleanser.”
After the gallery we had lunch in the crypt, and Simon was right: it was cool, although kind of weird to be eating while sitting on top of some ancient memorial slab, so worn that the names and dates had been scraped off by the feet of people and chairs. The last vestige of someone’s entire life, blurred and obscured as the stone wore away. It was the sort of thing I would have found unsettling, but not Simon. “They have jazz nights on Wednesday, you know,” I said, remembering my role.
“Oh, I love jazz,” said my Roxane, effectively dimming whatever strange attraction I’d conceived for him while in character. I hated jazz. The only thing worse than jazz was avante garde jazz.
“It’s so nice and cool down here,” he said, fanning himself with the wine list. “You must be boiling in long sleeves.”
“It’s a light fabric,” I said, although it made no difference in this bloody weather. I was boiling, but short sleeves were a no-no for this role, on account of the scar. I’d got it when I was ten, when I’d fallen off a trampoline and my bones had broken through the skin, piquing my brother’s lifelong fascination with the human skeleton. It was on the underside of my left forearm, about three inches long and very noticeable, especially since I’d recently caught the sun.
Rob wore his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his arms was fine and fair and I had a sudden desire to touch it, to trace the shape of the black cat tattoo. So I did. I reached out and touched his arm, my thumb brushing the fragile skin on the inside of his elbow.
His eyes darkened and his gaze flickered over my mouth. “I like that,” I said, quickly withdrawing my hand. “Your tattoo.”
“My cat,” he said. “I had a little black cat called Pixie, but people drive like eejits…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I thought she’d be okay, because we were a way off the road, but one day she went exploring and…well…that was that.” He waved a hand at the tattoo. “So. I got that.”
“It’s very sweet.”
He looked like he was about to cry, but covered it by looking at his phone. “We should probably get going,” he said. “Before the full horror of the rush hour.”
A weird tension had settled over us, and didn’t disperse on the way back. We parted at Victoria, where he had to take the District Line.
“I had a really nice time
today,” he said, as we stood to the side of the echoing white ceramic tunnel. Somewhere in the bowels of the Underground a busker was playing the saxophone, and notes of Baker Street came floating over the heads of the scurrying crowds.
“I’m glad,” I said. “That was sort of the general idea.”
His smile was instantly engaging. His eyes were true blue – the kind with no traces of green – and in this light they almost looked grey, and incredibly clear. I saw the tip of his tongue, pink against the gold of his moustache, and realised he was about to kiss me. And there was nothing I could do. I was Simon, and as Simon I wanted to get kissed.
Rob’s mouth was soft. His lips lingered on mine for what felt like an age. His beard tickled. I felt his tongue probing very gently, seeking entrance, but in that I felt secure: Simon wouldn’t do tongue on a second date. “I’ll text you,” I said, trying to soften the blow of not opening my mouth to him.
“You’d better,” he said, with a grin that was far sexier than it had any right to be. He kissed me again – on the cheek this time – and disappeared into the tunnel. I stood there for a moment or two, confused and maybe even slightly horny, but then a couple of tourist carrying a small mountain of suitcases came past and made me move towards the platform. I hopped on the southbound Victoria Line and immediately texted Simon.
—your boyfriend just tried to slip me the tongue. From now on, do your own dating.
I caught sight of myself in the darkened window of the train. Long sleeves, ugly shirt, hair carefully flattened. I rolled up my sleeves, ran my fingers through my hair, and contemplated growing a beard.
5
Nadia was good.
I spent half the morning on my knees, telling her that I adored her, while she cried real tears and begged me not to do this to her.
For the other half of the morning, Poppy – who was just as good, if not better – flashed her dark eyes at me and cajoled, flattered, threatened and generally wrapped me around her little finger.
Some part of me – one that I’m sure Rupa would have dismissed as the ingrained voice of male privilege – was yelling “Hang on, this isn’t right. Valmont is the whole play, and he’s being overshadowed.” And maybe it was male privilege, or simply good old-fashioned defensiveness, because another part of me knew I was fucking this up. I was prancing around the rehearsal room like a vacuous fop, while the women – Valmont’s victims and rivals – were drawing from a vast wealth of hashtagged experience to make this thing work.
Less Than Three Page 5
