If Only

by Kate Eberlen

  ‘It’s funny how times change, isn’t it?’ Spencer said as they wandered back to the hotel. ‘I mean, in those days, the guy’s reputation was going to be ruined by him shacking up with a prostitute. Now, it’s no big deal. So the story doesn’t really make sense any more.’

  Letty felt slightly alarmed by this analysis.

  ‘My main problem is nobody would sing like that if they were about to die, would they?’ Spencer said. ‘Maybe next time we can do something I like and you know nothing about.’

  ‘Maybe . . .’

  ‘I could take you to a football match.’

  ‘What makes you think I don’t know about football?’ she asked.

  He stopped in the middle of a bridge.

  ‘Who did Dennis Bergkamp play for?’

  ‘Arsenal and the Netherlands,’ she said.

  ‘Bloody hell! He was my childhood hero! Have you ever been to a football match?’

  ‘Just one, at White Hart Lane,’ she told him.

  ‘You’re a Spurs supporter?’

  ‘No. A friend of mine was.’

  ‘Because that could be a problem . . .’

  ‘In what sense?’ she asked.

  He laughed. ‘Well, I couldn’t introduce you to any of my mates, could I? Then again, maybe I want to keep you all for myself.’

  Tell him now, Letty thought, as they walked past a shop window full of Carnevale masks, some elegant, some grotesque. With their bare black eyes staring at her, she couldn’t seem to find the words.

  In the room, Letty made straight for the bathroom, showering, brushing her teeth and changing into the long white T-shirt she wore to sleep in, grateful to find luxurious fluffy white robes hanging from the door. When she came back into the room, she was relieved to see that Spencer had transferred a pillow to the sofa.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, conscious of his gaze on her back, then slipped the robe off and herself under the sheet in as quick a movement as possible.

  She heard him stand up and go into the bathroom, and when he came out, he switched off the lights and lay down on the sofa.

  ‘Goodnight!’ she said.

  The dark silence felt loud with the injustice of the situation, Letty knew she would never sleep.

  After a few minutes she sat up.

  ‘Look, I’d much rather sleep on the sofa myself.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I want to make it clear that I don’t want to have sex . . .’

  ‘I’d gathered that.’

  ‘But, it’s a huge bed . . .’

  Unable to say anything more, she lay down again, turning to rest on her side right at the edge of the bed, leaving at least five feet of space for him.

  For a while he did nothing, but then she heard him get up and climb into the other side of the bed, making no attempt to kiss or touch her. She lay listening to the rhythm of his breathing change and snatches of conversation from the street below becoming less and less frequent, until the only sound was the shift and creak of boats against their moorings. She had never actually fallen asleep in bed with a man before. With Josh it was always in the afternoons, after school. They’d had to keep as quiet as possible, stifling giggles with pillows so that Marina would not suspect. The only time they’d gone to his place – the final time – they’d used his mother’s bed. Probably because he didn’t want the world to see his single bed with its Spider-Man duvet. The frilly pinkness of Josh’s mother’s taste, the mock rococo white and gold headboard to which he’d tied her willing wrists with chiffon scarves they’d bought in Poundland together, hardly able to keep their hands off each other in the shopping aisle at the thought of what they were about to do, the incredible turn-on of trusting someone so much . . .

  Letty squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop the images racing through her brain and the sound of her pleading with him, ‘Yes, yes, do anything you want, give it to me, more, more, more . . .’

  It had followed her down every corridor and into every classroom.

  When she woke in the morning, she was surprised to see Spencer already up and dressed.

  ‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ he said.

  A gentleman, Letty thought, thinking of Marina.

  He did a double-take when she appeared at breakfast wearing the fifties dress and the white slingbacks, her hair scraped up into a high ponytail.

  ‘You look unreal,’ he said.

  She’d realized in New York that this was his phrase for paying a big compliment, rather than a comment about her being weird.

  ‘Can we go to Burano?’

  ‘Is that the island where they make glass?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s Murano, I think. This one is further away.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘My grandmother recommended it.’

  ‘Good enough for me,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a gondola.’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s miles too far for a gondola,’ Letty told him. ‘We have to go there by vaporetto.’

  ‘Vrrooom,’ Spencer said, making a speedboat kind of gesture with his hand.

  The journey took almost an hour, and when they arrived Burano was not at all as she had expected. It no longer felt like Venice; more like a humble coastal village, a community for artisans and workers out of sight of their wealthy aristocratic employers. The main streets were canals, but they were only large enough for little boats. What was beautiful about the island was that all the houses were painted in bright paintbox colours – blue, pink, yellow, green – making it feel almost like a child’s drawing of a place.

  ‘You match the houses,’ said Spencer, stopping to take a selfie of the two of them against adjacent pink and blue dwellings.

  Marina’s exact words. Letty had the almost eerie feeling that she was walking in her grandmother’s footsteps. She was aware that she looked so unusual in her grandmother’s dress that people were stopping to take pictures of her, but with her eyes behind dark glasses, it was almost as if it wasn’t really her, just a role she was playing.

  On the main street, there were tiny shops selling table linen made of Burano lace.

  Letty bought a single round doily for Marina’s bedside table. Spencer pondered over a tablecloth and napkins, finally deciding against.

  ‘People don’t use tablecloths any more, do they?’ he asked, making Letty wonder who he’d had in mind for the gift.

  In the square, where they sat at a pavement table drinking glasses of light white wine, an old man was playing the accordion, a couple of little girls dancing round and round in a circle.

  Letty didn’t know if it was the heat, the dress that smelled faintly of age, or the alcohol so early in the day, but she had the strangest feeling that her life was swirling around her, as if somehow she was supposed to be in this place, that it held a profound significance for her, but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was. Had the old man with the accordion always played here? she wondered. Had he been a young man when Marina had danced here? She was certain that she had been here in this spot. She could feel it so strongly.

  When they started walking back to the vaporetto station, Letty realized that wearing a pair of pointed shoes with slingbacks and no tights on a hot day had been a silly idea. Puffy blisters were turning to sore wet patches on her heels and toes, making walking in the shoes impossible. The boat was about to leave and vaporetti to the island were infrequent.

  ‘Do you want a piggyback?’ Spencer asked.

  He carried her to the quayside, earning a round of applause from the delighted Italians already on board.

  Back at the hotel, she went to the bathroom to wash and tend to her feet. When she came out, he was standing at the window. When he turned, he looked disappointed.

  ‘What?’ she said, looking down at the shorts and T-shirt she’d changed into. Surely there wasn’t a dress code for the gondola ride he’d booked.

  ‘You looked so sexy in that dress,’ he said. ‘It was all I could do not to fuck you all the way back across
the lagoon.’

  It was a curious relief to hear the words finally spoken.

  He was a good-looking man who was incredibly generous to her, she thought, and now the cards were on the table and she had to make a decision. It wasn’t that he was unattractive, more that she saw him with the same detachment she might look at a film star who was inarguably handsome but not her type.

  It couldn’t be worse than what had happened with Josh, could it? Perhaps it might even be preferable to have sex without love. Perhaps her mistake had been to think that one was inseparable from the other.

  They were in the Danieli with the Venetian lagoon lapping outside, in the city of Casanova and James Bond. It was almost weirder not to have sex, wasn’t it? They were grown-ups. What had she got to lose?

  She looked straight at him, then suddenly he was pushing her back onto the bed, pinning her arms behind her head, and when she tried to say, ‘No! Not like this,’ pulling her shorts down over her narrow hips, tearing her panties aside and entering her, panting on top of her for what was probably only thirty seconds, but felt like a lifetime of powerlessness.

  The following morning, Letty returned to the house in Belsize Park, limping because of the blisters on her feet and the rawness inside that went all the way from her groin to her belly button. She was about to put her key in the door when it opened.

  Her father’s face was streaked with tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Letty,’ he said.

  27

  June

  ALF

  Gina had been dropping hints about her birthday. She was going to be twenty-five, but she kept calling it ‘a big birthday’. In some ways, she seemed younger; in others, older and more sophisticated. It was grown up for a twenty-five-year-old to own a flat and a brand-new car, to order things like Chanel soap on the internet because they didn’t sell it in Boots, or buy him Ted Baker shirts that he couldn’t wear except at her flat, because people would assume that he’d shoplifted them. But she was also really easy to please, and Alf loved seeing her face light up when he bought her a gift, even something as cheap as a white chocolate Magnum from the garage. He planned to do something special for her birthday, not just to even things up a bit, but because he enjoyed the buzz he got from surprising her.

  He had organized the weekend off work weeks before, wanting to be fresh for his A level English exam on the Monday. He was spending so much time out of the house his mum wouldn’t even realize he was away. She assumed he had a girlfriend. She’d always been cool about him sleeping over, after giving him a strict talking to about contraception when he was fifteen. Donna was maddening in some ways, but she wasn’t a hypocrite.

  Relations at home had stabilized, maybe because he wasn’t around much. Occasionally, his mum muttered about making sure he was doing enough schoolwork, but he always turned up on time to help her with her classes, so she couldn’t push it. The hostile words they had spoken to each other still seemed to hang in the air, like a slight smell of drains – always there, not quite bad enough to call the council – but since Alf had secretly been seeing Gina, he felt so much more relaxed about life, it was just easier to pretend there wasn’t a problem.

  When you hadn’t had sex for a while, you could forget how much difference it made. Since the first time, he and Gina never stopped. The more they did it, the more they wanted it.

  Gina was good at sex. She knew a lot of tricks and she was up for anything. There was an urgency to her enjoyment, as if she wanted to get as much of him as she could and then some. Alf often found himself remembering what Cal had said about her right at the start.

  ‘She’s in her prime, mate, and you’re in yours. They say it’s all downhill from here.’

  At school, Alf was good at covering his tracks. He’d had a lot of practice during boyhood. By the time people had discovered he was a dancer, Alf was such a well-established footballer the other lads were more curious than critical, occasionally trying to do pirouettes themselves and realizing how much skill was involved. And if any of the rugby players ever accused him of being gay, he was old enough by then to say, ‘So how come I’ve got my hands on a good-looking girl every night, while you’ve got your head stuck up another boy’s arse?’ Which was a line he’d got from Sadie.

  It was ironic that, in a way, Sadie had made it happen with Gina. Gina said it would have happened anyway. She said she knew from the first time she saw him at the audition. Alf had slightly altered his own chronology to make out he’d always fancied her too. Fact was, he had never given it serious thought until the black lace thong, but since then he’d thought about little else.

  Secrecy gave the relationship an added buzz of excitement. It turned him on when he and Miss Jones walked straight past each other in a school corridor, and he caught a waft of the perfume he’d watched her spraying around her shoulders that morning, as she stared at him in the mirror when he was getting out of the shower.

  Sometimes it felt a bit surreal, just the two of them in a glass box overlooking the sea, like he was fucking a fantasy woman. But afterwards, Gina would snuggle up next to him in the white cotton sheets that she got laundered each week and delivered back all fresh and smelling of ironing, and chatter away about the holidays they’d go on when he finished school. A friend of hers had been to the Maldives and said it was incredibly romantic; Gina had always wanted to see the Galapagos Islands where the turtles were. He’d lie there thinking that they were big plans given that they’d never even caught a tram up to Fleetwood, but not wanting to spoil the make-believe.

  It was her longing to go away somewhere together that gave him the idea for her birthday present. His first thought was a show in London, but Gina’s dad lived in London and he was minted. A hotel at the very top of Alf’s budget would still fall short of what Gina was used to. And going down to London would involve catching the train, where there was always a risk they’d be spotted. If he couldn’t give her luxury, Alf decided he’d give her beauty. The Lake District was drivable. During term time, it was unlikely anyone from school would pitch up in the same place on the same weekend as they were there, especially not if he booked a cottage, not a hotel. He got it all planned without her knowing.

  On the Friday, the biggest bouquet anyone had ever seen was delivered to the school for Gina, causing all sorts of speculation about who had sent it.

  ‘Dad always used to send me birthday flowers at school,’ Gina told him. ‘If people know it’s your birthday, they’re nice to you all day.’

  There must have been two hundred quids’ worth of flowers, Alf estimated, and when he woke her up in the morning and told her what they were doing, Gina insisted on taking the flowers with them. So it was the bouquet in the front and Alf lying along the back seat of the pink Cinquecento until they got out of Blackpool, as if he was in a getaway car.

  The cottage near Buttermere looked picturesque on the photos. What he hadn’t paid enough attention to was the main road it was on, which was why it was so affordable. But there were roses round the door and a bunch of wildflowers in a vase on the table. The OTT bouquet from Gina’s father looked completely out of place.

  The woman who met them with the keys pointed out the pint of milk in the fridge and, in the cupboard, some teabags, coffee sachets and sugar.

  ‘You’ve thought of everything,’ Gina said.

  She wasn’t even exaggerating. Gina was the least practical woman Alf had ever known. Her idea of cooking was stabbing a few holes in the film of a ready meal before putting it in the microwave, or ordering in a pizza. She had never bothered to replenish the coffee capsules after the complimentary box you got when you bought the machine ran out.

  ‘Checkout time is noon,’ the host said, handing Alf the keys, leaving him and Gina alone.

  ‘Which bed shall we sleep in?’ Gina asked, bouncing on each of the three beds upstairs, like Goldilocks.

  ‘We could try them all?’ Alf suggested.

  ‘Oh God, Alf,’ she said, wrapping herself round
his body. ‘I love being with you.’

  There was a whole world of difference between ‘I love being with you’ and ‘I love you’, and they were both careful to stick to the first, although when she looked at him with those liquid blue eyes, he sometimes thought she wanted to say it. He didn’t know how he’d reply if she did, but he thought he’d probably go with ‘I love you too’, because he felt great with her, and he wanted to protect her, not upset her. And that’s what love was, wasn’t it?

  They locked the door carefully, making sure that Alf had the keys, and went for a walk. It felt weird being out in the open, and he wasn’t sure if he should maybe put his arm around her. They knew each other’s naked bodies inside and out, but the simple act of holding hands, fully clothed, felt charged with a risky kind of intimacy. Each time a car drove past, it was like both of them held their breath, fearing they were going to be seen together.

  When the path divided, they automatically veered off along the fork that took them by the lake, and the nerve-wracking noise of approaching cars was replaced by birdsong and the lapping of small waves as the wind blew across the water. It felt nice, wandering along, occasionally stopping to say how lovely the view was, then dropping a kiss on her lips, before walking on again. It helped calm him about his upcoming exam. Gina had now read the books on the syllabus so that she could help him, and they ran through the key points he needed to remember. A few hikers passed them going in the opposite direction, giving them odd looks which Alf assumed was because neither of them were wearing suitable clothes. Gina was in white jeans and silver ballerina-type flats that were her only concession to practicality, since she usually wore heels. He was in jeans and trainers. Neither of them had bothered with jackets because the sun was shining when they left the cottage.

  He estimated that they were about two thirds of the way round the lake when the sun suddenly disappeared, leaving only bright curls of light around the edges of dark thunderclouds. Then the skies opened. They stood in the scant shelter of a tree, trying to decide whether it would be quicker to go back the way they’d come, or continue the last bit of the circuit. Then Gina remembered you weren’t supposed to stand under trees in a storm, so he thought they’d be better off choosing the shorter route. It was low-lying and boggy. Gina’s jeans were spattered, and the squelching mud kept grabbing her pumps from her feet. He could feel the wetness seeping into his trainers and creeping up the legs of his jeans. He hadn’t brought another pair. He was cross with himself and a bit irritated with Gina screaming every time there was a clap of thunder that they should have gone the way they knew.