Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  I get up and go to the cupboard. I ease my sketchbook out from under the photo album and the A–Z. I turn to my latest fledgling portrait of Dad. I look at it critically. The nose is not right, the angle of the forehead is all wrong. He looks too old. But it’s in pencil and I have a rubber. Or I can start again. I turn to a fresh page, run my fingers over the smooth cream cartridge paper. I get down my set of pencils and I start to sketch Dad again. I notice he has colours in the texture of his face you wouldn’t expect – greens and blues and greys and ambers, depending where the light catches its contours. I need colour; I will use oil paints on this one. If you add Cadmium Red and Phthalo Blue to Burnt Sienna you get the most amazing rich brown that’s the perfect shade for an Italian father’s eyes.

  First, though, I need to get the lines right and I concentrate and I sit and work for an hour, looking and looking and making marks on the page – some light and feather-like, some purposeful and considered – and when I hold the sketchbook away from me I am quite pleased.

  There’s a knock at the door. I put the sketchbook down and go to the window.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asks Dad, from under the headphones.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t see anyone.’

  Whoever it is must have tucked themselves right under the door frame. I really don’t want to go down. I don’t want to answer the door in a pair of Dad’s old tracksuit bottoms and a shabby white vest – I look either like an extra from The Sopranos, betraying my Italian roots in a really shameful manner, or like something from Rab C. Nesbitt. No one knocks on our door at this time of night. I really hope it’s not Kemp come back for his glasses.

  After a few seconds there is another knock. I put the sketchbook back in the cupboard, huff the huff of those weary of the world and its cold-callers, and clank down the iron stairs in my bare feet to open the door to a grinning Salvi, who is standing there with a single tulip in his hand and his hair smarmed back. He’s wearing a very snappy suit and shiny shoes and looks far too gorgeous for the middle-aged-Sicilian-mafia-moll-on-their-day-off who’s just opened the door.

  ‘Hello, Prue,’ he says in a casual manner, like he didn’t run out on me last night.

  ‘Hello, Salvi,’ I say. ‘What are you up to?’ I am carefully and equally casual – though actually, of course, I am bloody delighted he is here. At least I look the part: if an outfit ever said ‘Couldn’t care less’ in capital letters, this is it.

  ‘Seeing if you want to come out to play later,’ says Salvi cheekily. He’s actually got one hand on his hip. He looks like a naughty schoolboy. ‘As I was in the neighbourhood. I’ve been in Primrose Hill intimidating a witness-for-the-prosecution.’

  He hands me the tulip, laughing at his own macabre joke, and I take it. ‘Really?’ I ask. I’m sure I should be saying something equally witty, but I can’t think of anything. My heart is thundering in my casual chest too much.

  ‘Yeah, want to see his blood? I have some on my handkerchief.’

  ‘Er, no, you’re all right.’ I yank my vest down over my tracksuit bottoms. Try to look unruffled.

  He laughs again, loud and bold. ‘So, yeah, all in a day’s work. Do you want to come out for dinner, around eight? Put your glad rags on?’

  I look down at my sorry outfit, then back up at him. ‘OK,’ I say quickly, all pretence of not caring he is here gone. ‘Yes, I’d like to.’

  ‘Great. So, the famous Palladian,’ he says, looking up at our kitchen window. ‘Can I come up and take a look?’ He already has one of his shiny feet over the threshold.

  ‘Er …’ I really don’t want him to, but before I know it he is bounding up the clanking stairs behind me, two at a time, to the inner door. He’s in the hall with me. He’s in the sitting room. That’s a really expensive suit he’s got on, I think, as he stomps around, looking this way and that. I put the tulip on my chair and tap Dad on the shoulder.

  ‘Dad? Dad, Salvi’s here. We’re going out later but he’s just come for a quick look at the flat.’

  Dad goes to get up. Salvi is admiring the cornicing, looking out of the Palladian window, picking things up and putting them back down again – including Kemp’s sunglasses. His bum looks nice beneath the vents of his smart jacket. His shirt is pure white and very crisp still, for the end of the day.

  ‘Hello, fella? How you doing?’ he says in Dad’s direction, after he has examined my box of pencils and set them back on the table.

  ‘Hello,’ says Dad, from his chair. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good, good, great actually. Really great. I wondered what this place looked like on the inside. How long you been here?’

  ‘Thirty-six years.’

  Salvi nods. ‘Love it, love it,’ he says. He wanders to the doorway of the kitchen, peeks his head inside, then does the same with the bedrooms and the bathroom. ‘I feel a bit like an estate agent,’ he laughs. ‘I’ll be getting my tape measure out in a minute. Right, well, I’ve got to shoot off. Meet you at Wotton’s on the Strand, at eight, Prudence?’

  ‘OK, yes, I’ll be there.’ Why not? Another place I’ll need to look up, I think.

  ‘Perfect. Like you,’ he whispers. He has stepped forward so he is standing very close to me. I can smell cologne and the faint hint of beer. He kisses me on my good cheek and I squirm and pull away as politely as I can.

  ‘He can’t see us,’ Salvi whispers, too loudly, and he trots out of the flat and down the stairs with a jaunty clatter and slams the brown doors behind him. I catch Dad frowning and raising an eyebrow I cannot mistake for anything but disapproval, but of course it is easy for me to ignore it.

  I like Salvi and he appears to like me. I’m going on a second date when dating has always been a foreign land to me, for which I’ve had no passport.

  And a distraction is a distraction, after all.

  CHAPTER 23

  Wotton’s is cavernous and kaleidoscopic. Every colour in the spectrum – from shimmering amber to neon green to hot purple – has been elbowed and cajoled into this space, which, despite being huge and high-ceilinged, is jam-packed with a technicolour array of booths and banquettes and bars, in suede and leather and gold and steel, and presided over by two enormous multicoloured stained-glass murals. To the right, the mural runs floor to ceiling, with double-decker buses and cabs thundering along the Strand behind it to cast myriad and fluctuating shapes on to the faces packed and perched within. To the left, the glass mural is back-lit with panels of gold and red and green. Both are etched with a rainbow of hedonist creatures: drinkers and dancers and half-dressed revellers who raise glasses and snake arms around each other’s waists in a tableau of sin and stained-glass.

  The wall facing us as we walk in looks like a giant version of ‘Simon’, that retro game where you press the moulded coloured panels to follow a lit-up sequence. I get the crazy urge to go over and press my bum against one of the padded, lit-up squares, just to see what happens, but that would bring attention to myself. I’m exposed enough as it is, just being here, but I’ve laid it on thick, my make-up, and although Wotton’s is brighter than the Dickensian, everyone around me looks flattered by the light here. I hope it will do the same for me.

  Salvi was waiting outside. Eight o’clock on the dot. He was on his phone, smiling at something, leaning against the wall next to the entrance and wearing jeans and a white shirt, which as I got closer I realized was embroidered with tiny figures – cute divers in navy swimming trunks and 1950s bikini babes in sunglasses and turbans, lying on beach towels. When I was close enough for him to look up and smile, he simply took me by the hand and we walked into the bar.

  The music is thumping as we make our way to our booth, and I smile at finding the pair of us stepping in time to Grace Jones’ ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ – Salvi with a swagger, me with the uncertain step of a second-dater who’s not exactly sure how the first date went. I hope I look OK. I’m wearing a jersey stretch cream midi dress with cap sleeves, slash hip pockets and a cowl neck – a dress I’d bought
myself for my fortieth birthday but have never, ever worn. Salvi shows me to my seat, half of a purple velvet banquette, facing the stained-glass spectacle that flanks the Strand and I presume he will take the seat opposite – the waiting studded leather hardback chair – but he wedges himself next to me, his thigh flanking mine, denim to silky cream jersey, birthmark side.

  ‘Good evening,’ he says, and when I automatically turn to face him he leans from his side-saddle position and his eyelashes and his big warm smile come towards me and he kisses me. He smells of cinnamon and coconut. His lips are warm and soft and teasing and he holds them on mine for a few seconds, then his tongue edges forward and in my relief and joy at being out with him again, I find myself daring to meet it with mine, and before I know it we are doing the kind of snogging my dad never witnessed at school discos, the kind of ‘Look at us’ kissing only the drunk, smug or those with something to prove will exhibit.

  When it’s over, Salvi sits back in his seat and picks up the drinks menu, as though nothing has happened, and I sit back in mine, reeling. I wasn’t expecting to be kissed at the beginning of the night and certainly not like this – it’s like we just stepped from the end of last night’s date straight into half-past midnight of this one.

  ‘So, how are you?’ asks Salvi, turning to me again, drinks menu in hand. As we were kissing, my forearm was angled against the edge of the table and resting in a puddle-patch of water – condensation of a former patron’s drink? I soak up that dark water now with a left-behind, pristine napkin, pushing it to the corner of the table when sodden.

  ‘Good, thanks. You? What was the lawyerly thing, really?’

  ‘Someone I had to go and see. Papers to sign. Deathly dull, you know how it is.’ Well, I really didn’t. I wasn’t a hot-shot criminal barrister. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘What would you like to drink? They do excellent cocktails.’ Of course, he’s been here before. He slides the menu over to me like he’s a croupier at a casino, with the flat base of his hand. A performer’s move. I wonder if everything with him is going to be a performance and what role I will play. I pick it up and scan the cocktail list.

  ‘A pina colada, please.’

  ‘You can’t have that!’ He shakes his head at me. ‘That’s so pedestrian. Have a Wotton Woo Woo. It’s wonderful, trust me.’

  The Woo Woo in the menu looks like a plumed bird of prey, it has fruit skewers and feathers and umbrellas spiking from it; a firework of a cocktail.

  ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

  I hate that I have to continually turn my face in order to talk to him. Give him a full view of The Cheek. I try to look enigmatic but I’ve hardly got an enigmatic face. It’s an open book, surely: you can read anything on my face; after all, it comes with its own map.

  ‘Done anything nice today?’

  ‘My father and I went to Liberty’s and then to the Royal Albert Hall.’

  ‘Oh, fantastic, fantastic. Much going on?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Albert Hall. Did you go to a concert?’

  ‘No, Dad wanted to have a look at the outside.’

  ‘A look?’ Salvi laughs.

  ‘You know what I mean. A feel for the place. He likes to touch the fabric of buildings. Brickwork, beams. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Because he used to be an architect?’

  ‘Yes.’

  An attractive girl, the waitress, pitches up at the table – London seems to be heaving with them. ‘Hi, Salvi,’ she says – all boobs and tiny waist and big kohled eyes.

  ‘Natalia,’ he drawls idly, like he just screwed her last week.

  ‘What are we having tonight?’

  I fear he may lick his lips and say ‘You’, the way he is looking at her, so I decide to give her my best death stare – he won’t notice as he’s next to me – but she coolly ignores me. Girls like her always do.

  ‘A Whiskey Sour, please, and this beautiful lady will have a Wotton Woo Woo.’

  Natalia can’t hide her derision. And I am finding it hard to conceal mine. He’s taking the piss, isn’t he? I have never, by any stretch of the imagination, been beautiful. Dad once had a record – ‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman’, Dr Hook – I loved that song, but I knew the whole concept would always be beyond me. I gingerly touch my cheek, where the birthmark lies beneath. I want to scratch it off with my fingernails, bleach it, burn it, for it to be gone. I want a matching pair of smooth cheeks like everybody else. I want to be Natalia.

  ‘Certainly. Nuts?’

  ‘Why not, babe?’

  ‘Great,’ she exclaims and off she trots, wiggling her behind at Salvi.

  ‘Babe?’ I question.

  ‘Everyone’s “babe”.’ Salvi shrugs. ‘I enjoyed it last night,’ he adds. ‘Did you get home OK?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I say. I am bright, purposely chirpy. I am not going to acknowledge that he ran out on me. I am grateful to be here.

  ‘You can’t beat a London cab. Is that how you and Dad have been getting around? Taxi? Must be the easiest, you know, with him being the way he is.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We’ve been walking and taking the tube. Always a bit of an adventure,’ I add wryly.

  Salvi laughs. ‘I bet. Wow, good for you. I was stuck in a tunnel for twenty minutes the other week – it made me an hour late for a briefing. The wig that had been roasting in my briefcase came out like sweaty roadkill!’

  I laugh, but I’m going to ask him, I think. I’m going to ask him about Philippa. His Facebook friend. ‘Did you hear about that poor girl who died on the underground a couple of weeks ago?’ I say, ultra casually.

  ‘Yeah, vaguely.’ Not a flicker on his face, not a blink. ‘There’s always some idiot.’

  ‘Philippa someone,’ I add.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ His gaze wanders round the room then returns to land on me, his eyes blank. He doesn’t know her, does he?

  ‘It’s terribly sad. She was only twenty-nine.’

  ‘Yes, terribly sad.’ He grins at me slowly, brushes a hand over the top of his head. Oh, he definitely doesn’t know her – Philippa probably just heard of him as this eligible bachelor, read about one of his cases at Egon and Fuller, or a profile in a magazine, and Friend Requested him, like people do. She was just one of his 3,015 and he was just one of her 102.

  Our drinks arrive. My cocktail looks even more preposterous than its photo. I sip at it through a neon straw and it is savagely strong.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Salvi asks, draining a third of his drink in one.

  ‘What?’ That’s a very blunt question. Salvi’s green eyes are glinting. What is he doing?

  ‘Your mother. You live with your father and you’ve never mentioned her. Is she dead?’

  ‘No, she’s not dead. She lives in Sweden.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No.’

  I don’t want to talk about my mother. I want to concentrate on the way Salvi is looking at me. He’s looking right into my eyes. I notice flecks of navy and ochre in his eyes, fuchsia flashes reflected from a 2D woman doing the samba in the stained-glass opposite us. I feel half hypnotized. I wonder when he’s going to kiss me again.

  ‘You look beautiful when you’re angry.’

  ‘Oh, come on! You’re having me on! I’m not beautiful!’ I am pretending to be affronted now, as I’m not sure I am. I am tempted to be flattered, to believe his lie. And in approximately ten minutes, if I keep on drinking this cocktail, I will be drunk.

  Salvi looks at me quizzically. He is smiling too, a smile I want to jump into and flail around in, for a while. ‘How do you feel about your birthmark?’

  My head snaps back. I feel I’ve been come at with a red-hot poker. My hand involuntarily goes up to my cheek. Why is he interested in my birthmark? I trusted he could barely see it in this kaleidoscopic light, but he’s shoved it straight under the glare of a harsh bare bulb.

  ‘Do we have to talk about t
hat? How do I feel about it? Good God!’ Now I feel angry and hot – the bloody thing is going to flare like a beacon under all my make-up. ‘I hate it! What do you think?’

  ‘What I think,’ he says evenly, ignoring my outburst, ‘is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think you’re beautiful. And it gives you character.’

  ‘I’d rather be character-less. Unnoticed. Character I’d rather not have, thank you very much.’ The prickles are up; they are bristling, ready to pierce something. First my mother, now this! I want to get up from his side and go.

  ‘I’ve upset you,’ he says calmly. ‘I was just interested. Look, let’s order another round of drinks. Please. Don’t be like that.’

  He places his hand over mine again and turns to call a different waitress over. I am still smarting. I keep my other hand in front of my face, not touching it, though, as I don’t want any make-up to come off.

  The waitress comes over. Salvi orders the same again. ‘I really like you,’ he says, as he turns back to me. ‘It was a stupid question. Please, let’s just move on.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘We’ll move on.’ I can’t have this evening ending in disaster and disappointment again, I just can’t. ‘Honestly!’ I add, light as artificial air. ‘Just because you like being the centre of attention. Hot-shot barrister and unicyclist!’

  I have successfully lifted the mood and it floats upwards, taking us with it, to the atrium skylight in this place, where a big round yellow moon sits in its frame and laughs at us all. A double-decker bus thunders along the Strand, rattling the technicolour glass that divides us from it. A red prism descends on Salvi’s face like a butterfly, then passes. He is grinning at my wit and my deflection, his eyes lit bright and kaleidoscopic; we are both relieved this moment has passed.

  We eat. We talk and we drink and we laugh and we order more cocktails and more food arrives and we eat and we talk and I see a possibility, for us. For something to be happening here. I feel he won’t run out on me again. I feel we have a spark between us, a pilot light that could inflame into sometime bigger and all-encompassing any second. I also definitely feel drunk.