by Kate Eberlen
The florist was selling red and yellow tulips, two bunches for five pounds. He asked if they could put a bit of tissue and ribbon around. But the studio was already locked up when Alf got there. He looked at his watch. It was gone eleven and suddenly, he remembered that he was supposed to be on the other side of town, at Miss Jones’s flat.
‘That’s so sweet! You really shouldn’t have!’ Miss Jones said when she saw the flowers. Barefoot, and wearing a short dress, she looked much younger and prettier than she did at school.
He didn’t want to mention the stuff with his mum, so he just handed the flowers over.
Miss Jones indicated that he should take his trainers off. He hoped his feet didn’t smell.
The flat was so new it looked more like a computer-generated image than a place where someone was living. The main room had French doors leading out onto a balcony overlooking the sea. There was a sofa on the wooden floor still in its plastic packing. The master bedroom had a cream carpet and a big window with another sea view. The double bed was covered with a white cotton duvet cover. It was like something you’d see in a posh hotel, except for the blue kitten, white rabbit and soft furry hedgehog propped up on the pillows. Miss Jones showed him a remote control that made a television screen rise out of the tailboard. He’d only ever seen that in adverts.
Alf knew you’d have to have a lot more than a teacher’s salary to afford a place like this.
‘Coffee?’
Miss Jones had one of those machines that George Clooney advertised, where you put capsules in.
She took three mugs from a cupboard and arranged the tulips in one of them.
‘Hadn’t even thought about vases,’ she said. ‘Who knew how much work it is making a home!’
She’d bought him a Victoria sponge in a box. He wondered if she’d stopped to get it on her way home yesterday afternoon, after inviting him over. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the fridge apart from a two-pint bottle of semi-skimmed milk. She cut him a big slice, then didn’t have a plate to put it on.
The way she fussed about the kitchen, opening the empty cupboards as if crockery would somehow miraculously appear, reminded him a bit of nursery school, where the girls always spent their golden time in the Wendy house playing at being mummies, offering invisible meals on doll-size plastic plates and pretend cups of tea.
There was nowhere to sit down, so he stood leaning over the sink, trying not to drop crumbs.
‘So what do you want a hand with?’ he asked.
‘That lot,’ she said, pointing to a pile of boxes containing flat-pack furniture.
‘You’re very good at this,’ she said, as he screwed the legs into one of the dining chairs. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue!’
‘Wait till you’ve tried it,’ he said. ‘It might collapse!’
It didn’t. She sat down, kicking her legs straight out in front of her.
‘Next?’ he asked.
‘How much time do you have?’ she asked him.
‘I’m not working till this evening,’ he said, then wondered if he’d just committed himself to staying all day.
‘You really don’t mind?’ she asked.
‘Pleasure,’ he said.
The polite response was automatic, but he was happy enough. The bare room with its view of the sea felt calm after the trouble at home; he was too pissed off with Cal to want to spend Saturday afternoon watching the football in a pub with him. He quite liked the slight feeling that he shouldn’t be there, although he couldn’t say why not. He was eighteen. It was his free time.
Removing the packing, Alf lined the pieces up on the floor with the correct Allen keys. He’d done quite a lot of stuff like this with Gary.
‘Bloody hell, Alf,’ said Miss Jones. ‘Is there any way you’re not perfect? A man who can dance and put up shelves!’
‘Not that good at English,’ he said.
‘If you want, I’ll give you extra lessons,’ Miss Jones said.
She held his gaze and he couldn’t tell whether the offer was for real, or whether she was teasing him.
At first, he was hesitant about asking her to hold stuff steady, or hand him the correct fixtures, but she was easy to chat to, not sarcastic like some of the older teachers. When he asked why she’d chosen teaching, she admitted that she’d wanted to be an actress, but after spending two years as a waitress and never getting any of the roles she went for, she decided there were better ways to earn a living. Then, as if remembering that he wanted a career in theatre himself, she added, ‘It’s a precarious existence, Alf, but you’re so talented, you’ll be fine. And to be honest, you’re a much better waiter than I ever was too!’
With the shelves and coffee table assembled, the living room looked less like a show flat.
‘Do you mind if I watch Final Score?’ he asked.
‘Be my guest.’ She waved towards the bedroom.
‘I just want to see how Blackpool did.’
He switched on the television, and sat on the very edge of the bed with his feet on the floor.
After a few minutes, Miss Jones walked in, went around the other side and lay on top of the duvet, propping herself up on the pillows. She patted the bed.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said.
Alf lay there feeling anything but, with only the three cuddly toys separating them.
Was she coming on to him? She was nice and pretty and fun, and if it had been anyone else he knew behaving like this, he would have known. But she was a teacher. The rules were different.
Alf tried to think down the erection he was getting. All the league teams beginning with A. Aston Villa, Arsenal, Accrington Stanley. There were guys at school who’d pay money to be where he was now. Blackpool, Birmingham, Brentford, Bury, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley. It had been a while since he’d had sex. Chelsea, Coventry, Chester, Charlton Athletic. Eight months. Derby. Surely there must be more Ds than Derby? Everton. He couldn’t think of any more Es.
‘You know what Sadie said?’ Miss Jones asked.
Was that what this was all about?
‘You don’t want to take any notice of Sadie, Miss Jones!’ he said. Then, glancing across the pillows, he saw the dismay on her face.
‘I mean, most of the guys think you’re really fit,’ he told her.
‘But you don’t . . . ?’
‘It’s not that I don’t. But . . .’
But what? he thought. But I’m a good boy? But you’re a teacher? She was fit. She knew what she was doing. He was eighteen. An adult. He hadn’t had sex for months.
‘I think about you all the time, Alf,’ she said, looking at him with her big blue eyes.
‘Miss Jones?’
‘Gina,’ she said.
Then the cuddly toys were on the floor and her face was so close to his he could smell that she’d just brushed her teeth. The only thing she was wearing under her dress was a black lace thong.
26
May
LETTY
It was almost as if by imagining a friendship with the American woman at the sculpture lectures, Letty caused it to happen. The day after she returned from New York, she ran into Molly browsing the new fiction table in Blackwell’s. They struck up a conversation. Molly was taking a Liberal Arts Masters. They talked about the production of La Traviata at the Met, which she had also seen. She confessed that the abstract modern design had not quite worked for her either. Molly provided tips for if Letty ever visited the Big Apple again, and Letty advised Molly about the lesser-known art galleries and theatres of London she should check out during her year in the UK.
When they’d parted outside the King’s Arms, Letty felt she’d found someone who genuinely shared her interests.
The majority of Letty’s fellow Classics students were public schoolboys who saw Oxford as a rite of passage before becoming lawyers in Bloomsbury. No one admitted to a passion for their subject. In fact, when Letty had used the word at their first seminar, the students around her had wrinkled th
eir noses with distaste. During her first year in college, meals in hall, where most people made and developed friendships, had been torture for Letty. Letty had always been first in, first to sit down, first to finish and escape. One or two boys had been confident enough to try to chat her up, but Letty’s serious demeanour was a barrier that nobody was patient enough to penetrate.
After becoming friends with Molly, Letty finally began to enjoy the social life that most students had taken for granted from day one. She thought perhaps it was because Molly’s crowd were all American, so they didn’t consider her any more peculiar than other English people. They were mostly Rhodes Scholars who’d got fraternities and sororities out of their system in the States, and valued the old-fashioned traditions of Oxford, such as visiting each other for tea, or punting on the river.
If you weren’t doing exams during the summer term, the pace of university life slowed down. Students who were involved in drama spent their days rehearsing for garden productions and evenings performing; others simply revelled in the beauty of the college gardens, doing archery or playing croquet on the lawns.
One Thursday afternoon, at the end of the fifth week of term, a group of them were in a punt hired from the Cherwell Boathouse. The air was filled with birdsong and when Letty’s phone rang, she found herself apologizing to five frowning faces as she fumbled in her bag to answer it. Her nerves were jangling. The ringing of her phone indicated urgency. She was always half expecting a call telling her that Marina had taken a turn for the worse, so when the name that appeared on the screen was not Frances, she answered with relief.
Apart from an acknowledgement of the text she had sent to thank him, Spencer had not been in touch since they parted at the airport. She had slightly mixed feelings about it – on the one hand, hoping that she hadn’t said or done anything to offend him; on the other, relieved not to have to make more decisions about their association.
‘Cut to the chase,’ he said after their initial greetings. ‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’
She couldn’t even claim that there was an essay to write.
‘I’m thinking Venice,’ Spencer said.
Less than an hour before, it had crossed Letty’s mind that sitting in a punt with a brawny man in a striped T-shirt at the helm must be rather like being in a gondola. The coincidence made the phone call seem almost predetermined.
‘Venice?’ she repeated.
Opposite her, Molly raised an eyebrow. She was the only person Letty had told about Spencer, and she thought her friend disapproved but was also a tiny bit envious.
‘Know it’s short notice,’ Spencer was saying.
It made Letty feel less obliged to him. Presumably he had been stood up by some other woman and was looking for a replacement. She wondered how many phone calls he had made before getting to her.
‘When?’ she heard herself saying.
‘First flight out London City airport tomorrow. I can’t promise separate rooms – it is the Danieli. But I’m sure there’ll be a sofa. Bring a dress this time.’
There was something about his tone that made Letty immediately wish she’d declined, but when she analysed it she couldn’t think of a logical reason why. It was her own fault that she hadn’t packed carefully for the New York trip. It had cost him a lot of money. Surely he had a right to remind her?
Marina was propped up against a bank of pillows. Her nightie had a tea stain down the front, but her face lit up when Letty entered the room.
‘To what do we owe this pleasure?’ she asked.
Her language appeared to have reverted to the more elaborate courtesy of a bygone era where most of her clear memories now resided.
‘I’m on my way to Venice for the weekend,’ Letty told her.
‘La Serenissima!’ Marina smiled.
It was always a nice feeling when she connected with something in a positive way.
‘He bought me lace in Burano,’ Marina suddenly declared. ‘And we danced in the piazza.’
Her watery eyes sparkled.
‘How romantic!’ Letty said, trying to picture her grandparents dancing. Her grandfather was considerably shorter than Marina. ‘Was that the lace for your wedding dress?’ she asked.
‘We could not marry!’ Marina said crossly. ‘He was from a very old Venetian family. A conte!’
Now Letty regretted asking; Marina was agitated.
‘I was wondering if I could borrow a dress?’ She attempted to calm her grandmother with talk of clothes.
Opening the trunk at the foot of the bed, she held up dress after dress, bringing the ones that Marina nodded at over for closer inspection.
‘This is the one!’ her grandmother finally said.
It was made of glazed cotton with horizontal blue stripes dotted with pink roses, waisted, with a small white collar and buttons down the front, and a skirt so full it stuck out as if there were a crinoline underneath. It fitted Letty perfectly.
In the cupboard that contained racks and racks of shoes in a rainbow of colours, Marina gestured at a pair of pointed white slingbacks that suited the dress. How was it possible, Letty wondered, that the fashion part of Marina’s brain remained perfectly intact?
‘Yes,’ she said, gazing at Letty. ‘The colours match Burano. You must wear it there.’
‘Burano?’
‘Of course!’ Marina seemed very certain.
The dress was so different from any of Letty’s monochrome clothes, yet she loved the swishy feeling that it gave her as she twirled like a ballerina on a musical box so that Marina could inspect every angle. Had her grandmother really worn the dress in Venice? She liked the idea of returning Marina’s style back to her home country.
Bring a dress, she thought, wondering whether she would dare to wear it, and what Spencer would say if she did, but packing the black georgette cocktail dress he had bought her just in case she lost her nerve.
Motoring across the lagoon in the launch from the airport, Letty felt the kind of wonder she had experienced seeing the skyline of Manhattan; it was so like it was supposed to be that it almost felt unreal. The hotel Danieli, Spencer informed her, was where Daniel Craig had stayed in Casino Royale, and Johnny Depp in The Tourist. Housed in a large Venetian palace a stone’s throw from St Mark’s Square, it was as opulent inside as out. Their room looked over the lagoon towards the Palladian basilica of San Giorgio. On the water outside, a mismatched assortment of gondolas, water taxis and vaporetti continuously dropped and picked up myriad tourists. Letty thought that if she stood at the window for long enough she would see every person she had known, or would ever know.
‘What do you want to do?’ Spencer asked.
‘I could stay here forever and watch this view.’
‘Shall we get them to send up some lunch?’ he asked.
‘Why don’t we just wander?’ she suggested. ‘See what we find?’
The guidebook that she had bought at City airport said that the best thing to do in Venice was get lost, and it was remarkably easy in the maze of canals and passageways and bridges which, to a newcomer’s eye, all looked very similar in their decadent beauty. Within fifty metres of St Mark’s Square the density of the crowds thinned out, and there were canals where the only sign of human life was washing strung on lines, the smell of frying onions, the sound of mothers summoning their children to eat, and the clatter of eager footsteps in hidden kitchens nearby.
They found a bar selling tapas-like portions called cicchetti and bought several small plates, most of which Spencer consumed, along with glasses of white wine.
‘Eat up!’ Spencer urged her. ‘We won’t have time for dinner.’
‘Why’s that?’ Letty asked.
‘I’ve only got us tickets for La Fenice.’
He pronounced it La Fenniss.
‘La Fen-ee-chay,’ Letty said automatically, realizing too late that she’d both offended him and ruined his announcement.
‘How come it isn’t Ven-ee-chay, then?’ he asked de
fensively.
‘Because Venice in Italian isn’t Venice at all, it’s Venezia,’ she said.
‘What does La Fen-ee-chay mean when it’s at home?’ he asked.
She was quite pleased that she didn’t know the answer to that, because it went some way to restoring his dignity.
They looked it up on Google. It meant the phoenix, a mythical bird that rises from the ashes. Which, she thought, was quite appropriate, because she knew the theatre had burned down several times in its history. Or perhaps that was why it was called that? Maybe it was just a nickname given to it by the people of Venice.
‘Wasn’t it incredibly difficult to get tickets?’ she asked.
Now he looked pleased.
‘Yes, it was. We’re seeing La Traviata, by the way. La Fenice is the first place it was ever shown,’ said Spencer.
‘You have done your research!’
‘Happy?’
‘Very happy,’ she said.
‘Then it was worth it,’ he said, reaching across the table and taking her hand.
Letty’s smile froze, her hand captive under his.
He’d bought tickets for La Traviata at La Fenice, for goodness’ sake. It seemed ungenerous not to let him hold her hand, and yet, and yet . . . It was their first physical contact, apart from a peck on the cheek, and it felt so much more intimate, especially here, in this intensely romantic setting.
This was the city of masked balls and Casanova, Letty thought as they walked into the pink marble foyer with its huge chandelier. It was a place where the serene beauty of the exterior concealed undercurrents of duplicity and base desire. Aside from trappings of contemporary consumption – tiny quilted Chanel handbags on chains, jewels from Bulgari, and all the luxury watches that Spencer could ever aspire to – these people could be back in the eighteenth century, glancing at each other over their programmes, checking out the other boxes through their opera glasses.
What assumptions did they make about her and Spencer? she wondered. What was actually going on here? Spencer was the sort of person who had a business plan, an endgame. At some point the question of sex was going to arise, and she couldn’t bear the idea of it getting to the point where it was requested as an explicit part of the deal. This had to stop, and yet sitting in a gilded box surrounded by golden cherubim, looking up at a sky-blue ceiling with the Graces floating above, felt like being in heaven.