Ulrich stretched, yawned, looked up at the sky.
‘So, maybe we go get some breakfast? There is a nice place not far from here.’
The police were piling into their vans, the crowd was almost gone, the squat crane operator was packing up. The sun was coming out, and the air smelt like spring. What else was there to do?
‘Sure. Let’s go get some breakfast.’
ADAM IS RECEDING. He puts his hands forward to try and grab hold of yours, but when you close your fingers they only meet thin air, and of course you should have expected this: he has no body any more. And he looks at you, his arms outstretched, and it’s not clear whether his look is telling you to hold on to him or let him go, and the world shoots forward around him as he is catapulted far, far away from you.
And yet – simultaneously he stays right where he is, just beyond the clasp of your hand.
‘HRMPH.’
‘Mm.’
‘Hng.’
Warm. Smooth. Arms. One under her head, hers over a smooth chest. A lot of arms. Another one of hers is underneath him. The world is dark, she hasn’t opened her eyes yet, and she is not quite on the right side of consciousness. She isn’t sure where she is – she could be anywhere.
‘Gnrnhmph.’
She isn’t sure who he is – but he is warm and smooth and smells of hot sand.
‘Hello there.’
‘Hm.’
He laughs. He shifts his body so that he can fold his arms more fully around her.
‘Hmm.’
‘Is there anybody in there?’
She lets the light in, and finds a pair of wide blue eyes looking into hers, an amused, cocked eyebrow, their noses almost touching …
‘Adam.’
‘Eva.’
They smile at each other. It could be weird, them being here like this, when they have been such good friends for so long – well, only a couple of terms, but it feels like much longer – but it feels fine. It feels good. Simple. Like they’ve known all along that this is where they’d end up. They kiss.
‘D’you think you could move your arm a bit?’
He raises his body slightly and she tries to pull her arm out from underneath him, but it’s gone to sleep.
‘I think it’s gone to sleep.’
‘Oh.’
He picks it up and moves it for her.
‘Gah!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Ow ow ow!’
She writhes and shakes her hand out, while Adam laughs and holds on tightly to her; they are in a single bed, so there’s not much room for manoeuvre.
‘Watch it, you’re going to push me off the bed!’
‘Yow! I can’t believe you did that.’
‘Well, at least it seems to have woken you up a bit.’
‘Hmph.’
She turns into him, nestles her face into the curve of his neck; strange, how familiar this seems. How another person’s body can be so distant, untouchable, and suddenly become something that is yours to touch and taste and bury yourself into, not really an extension of your own because it is so much more than that – so much more interesting than your own, for a start. She strokes Adam’s back; he groans contentedly. She thinks about that night in Henry’s house – so that was what he wanted, after all. It’s amazing, really, that it took her so long to work out that it was what she wanted, too. How can she not always have wanted this beautiful, slender body, those beautiful blue eyes?
‘I think there’s someone knocking on your door.’
‘Really?’
‘Mm-hm.’
Indeed there is. Because Eva has preposterously big rooms – a bedroom and a giant study – it isn’t always easy to hear what’s happening at the other end of them. But there is, indeed, a knocking on the far door. She clambers over Adam, who harrumphs a bit as her weight passes over him, lets her feet slip on to the floor, stands. Whoa.
‘Whoa.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, just – shouldn’t have stood up so quickly.’
She closes her eyes to collect herself, and hears another knock. She’s enjoying being naked – it’s so fun, especially when you have someone knocking on your door, like being on the phone while you’re in the bath – until she opens her eyes and sees Adam is looking at her, which makes her grab for her dressing gown.
‘Oy, I was enjoying that.’
‘Hmph.’
She snatches the duvet and pulls it off him; in the brief instant it is uncovered, his bare body looks fragile, like a creature that is supposed to have a shell. Adam gives a girly shriek and pulls the duvet back over himself. Eva raises an eyebrow at him and bends down to kiss him before flouncing out to answer the door.
‘Bloody hell, you took your time.’
Carmen is wearing enormous shades and an optimistically light dress, and holds a bottle of something bubbly by its sturdy neck.
‘Get some clothes on, we’re meeting the boys in, like, ten minutes. Champagne breakfast. Well, Freixenet. Henry’s gone to Sainsbo’s to pick up some food.’
‘Huh?’
‘Summer’s here! We need to get to the river before everyone else does.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Eva casts a dubious glance out of her study window, but Carmen’s right: it’s glorious out there.
‘Cool, give me five minutes …’
Carmen is staring beyond her, wide-eyed, gawpy.
‘Noooooo waaaaaaaaay!’
‘Hi Carm.’
Adam is in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, leaning nonchalantly against the doorframe to her bedroom. His hair is all flat on one side of his head and stands in erratic spikes on the other. He looks very much like he has spent the night here. Eva’s eyes meet his, and she feels a thrill at the understanding that passes between them, the delicate, wry smiles they exchange, their memories of the night before: partners in crime.
Carmen looks from Eva to Adam, Adam to Eva, her face passing through varying, complex shades of incredulity and delight.
‘Well, well, well. Well done.’
‘Thanks. Anyway. Um. I guess we’d better, er – get dressed.’
‘Yeah, you bet you had. I can’t wait for Henry to see this.’
‘Well, aren’t you going to come in, then?’
‘Oh. Er. I don’t want to …’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can just wait in here. We’re not going to drag you into some kind of sex game or anything.’
‘OK. As long as there aren’t any sex games involved.’
Carmen comes in, and the door clicks shut behind her. Eva and Adam go into the bedroom and the door clicks shut behind them. Eva is very aware of these two clicking doors, of Carmen sitting between them, like in the air lock of a spaceship. Just yesterday there wouldn’t have been this: they would either all three of them have been in the same room, or if any one of them needed privacy, that person would be alone. This is new, this privacy of two people. While she’s rooting around in her drawer for a clean pair of knickers, Adam comes up behind her and encircles her in his arms, and they can feel the warmth of each other’s skin through the thin dressing gown and boxer shorts. He kisses her, nuzzles her cheek. Adam whispers,
‘You smell good.’
Eva whispers,
‘I can’t find any clean knickers.’
‘Ah.’
‘Will you judge me if I wear the same knickers as yesterday?’
‘Not at all, I have very fond memories of them.’
‘OK. Just don’t judge me.’
‘Tramp.’
‘You haven’t changed your boxer shorts, as far as I can tell.’
‘Hm. Fair point.’
Then they are dressed, and they pick up Carmen, and they are out into a glorious day, the first day of summer, with the genteel sun beaming down on them, cyclists weaving lazily up to the university library, grass so lush you could kiss it, and the smell, the sound, the sight of life, life, life all around them.
Two swans have built
a nest in the ditch by the side of the Avenue, and the cygnets hatched last week. It seems an unlikely venue for these noble creatures to set up house in, so muddy and shallow. The male in particular looks cramped, floating in the tight space between the nest and the bank, his head moving too slowly on the end of his long neck to keep up with his progeny, who are paddling off in all directions around him. Ugly ducklings, feathers all stubby and brown, looking half ungainly in the water and half made for it: you can see the frantic paddling that keeps them afloat – they haven’t yet developed the skill to glide seamlessly above it.
‘Blimey, it can’t be easy to keep tabs on that lot, can it?’
‘No, look: they never go too far.’
Sure enough, the mayhem is actually more circumscribed than it looks at first. The cygnets launch out, avid for the world, but as soon as they get to a certain distance from their parents, they turn back. Most of them have a range of about three feet; a couple don’t dare to go much further than one and a half or two. And then there is one cygnet with a bald patch on one side of its head and an Iroquois-like plume of white on the other, who ventures to four, maybe even five feet, followed by the beady eye of its father.
Then, with a soft hiss, the female swan moves off down the water, and the cygnets fall into line behind her at neatly spaced intervals – except for the little Iroquois, who had further to swim back and now lags behind, its small body rocking from side to side with the effort of catching up. The father brings up the rear, massive, imperious.
‘It’s hard to believe those tiny things will turn into that, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know we’re some of the few people in the country who are allowed to eat those?’
‘Oh. Hello, Henry.’
‘Special royal dispensation. It’s only us and maybe a bishop or two who are given the privilege. They belong to the Queen, you see.’
Henry went to Harrow, and is full of such arcane knowledge. How to truss a pheasant. Who owns the land you’re walking on as you clamber over a stile in Dorset. When to toast Prince Charles if you’re having him over for dinner. How the country really works, its secret etiquette, centuries of rules that you wouldn’t think still apply, but then you meet someone like Henry and you realize they do.
‘Roast swan.’
‘Pretty similar to goose, I imagine.’
‘Right, come on, chaps.’
Henry strides off down the Avenue, his hulking form weighed down by two heavy Sainsbury’s bags. Adam is lightly running his hand down Eva’s shoulder blade in an unconscious gesture of affection. Now he and Eva and Carmen exchange glances, and the pressure of his touch takes on the firmness of awareness before he lets his hand fall. Henry turns round and hollers,
‘Oy! Come on, you lot!’
Miraculously, they find an unoccupied spot on the riverbank: the gods are smiling on them today.
‘You got the bubbly then, Carmen?’
‘Yep. Did you remember to buy plastic cups?’
‘I nicked some wine glasses from hall.’
‘Oh, how refined of you.’
‘For you, my dear, only the very best.’
Henry pulls an improbable selection of foodstuffs out of his Sainsbury’s bags and hands them over to Carmen. She eyes them with the full suspicion of her Mediterranean heritage.
‘Jesus, Henry, these look disgusting.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘No kind of food should ever be that colour.’
‘I’ve had them before, they’re delicious.’
‘Spicy Peking Duck, and guacamole, and brie? Could you have chosen anything that went less well together?’
‘I was thinking, you know, we could do a sort of tapas-y thing. Right up your street, surely.’
‘Please don’t debase the word “tapas” in my presence.’
‘I’m only a poor English boy, Carm.’
‘Next holiday, we’re going to Madrid. I’ll show you what tapas means.’
They’re such an unlikely pair. Henry has the fleshy features of a man who has spent his youth playing rugby and will spend his adulthood drinking port; his physiology does not exist outside the English public-school system. Carmen combines the willowy form of her English father with her Spanish mother’s olive skin; she is graceful and wild, whereas Henry has all the oafishness of his class. And yet anyone can tell they love each other.
‘Right, who’s up for some of this delicious nectar, then?’
Henry hands out the glasses of Freixenet, and is holding his own up in preparation for a toast when a loud squawking and splashing erupts behind him. He jumps, spilling fizz on to his chinos, and they all turn towards the noise. On the river next to them, three ducks are attacking a fourth in a flurry of beaks and wings. They rise briefly out of the water, each in turn, to give it a brutal peck before splashing down again. The bullied duck tries to retaliate, its slender neck twisting like a hose, but none of its blows ever quite hit home.
‘Blimey. Talk about henpecking.’
‘Yeah. I wonder what the duck’s done wrong?’
‘Guys. I mean – shouldn’t we …?’
Adam is on his feet, looking helpless.
‘I mean, you know …’
He steps down to the edge of the water and stands there hesitantly for a while. Eva worries he might jump in. He tries to kick at the duck closest to him as it flies by on one of its pecks.
‘Bugger.’
‘Adam, mate, I wouldn’t get involved.’
‘But they’re going to kill it!’
He turns towards them, scanning the things they have strewn over the grass in search of a weapon. Eva thinks how handsome he looks, with his body tensed for action and his eyes as focused as a hunter’s. And how cute, how like a little boy, too, so distressed at seeing the ducks pick on each other.
He grabs Carmen’s handbag, an elegant little leather number on the end of a long strap.
‘Hey!’
‘Hang on.’
He takes out its contents and sets them down next to the Spicy Peking Duck: a wallet, a tampon, a copy of Wordsworth’s Selected Poems.
Henry picks up the book.
‘You enjoying these?’
‘Meh. Not sure. He’s a bit namby-pamby, isn’t he?’
‘Really?’
Henry sounds disappointed.
‘I quite like Wordsworth, actually …’
Adam swings Carmen’s bag at one of the attacking ducks and lands a square blow to its side, which sends it flapping into the water. Its acolytes move away and regroup by the other bank of the river. They still look conspiratorial, though. The victimized duck has stayed put. Adam squats down and reaches out to it – ‘Come on, ducky’ – at which point it takes fright and flies a short distance away, landing again on the water at the foot of the bridge.
‘Right. Can I have my bloody lunch now?’
Henry removes the wrappers from his luridly pigmented items.
Just as Adam sits back down next to Eva, the racket starts again: the ducks have flown back to their victim once more, and now that they are under the bridge, their cries are amplified and distorted into harrowing sounds. Adam starts, but Eva lays a hand on his.
‘You won’t be able to get down to them there, Ad. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to stop it, anyway.’
‘Goodness. I think they might be gang-banging it.’
‘Shut up, Henry.’
Adam looks so downcast, so innocent with his golden hair in the summer sunlight, that Eva wishes it were possible to wrap herself around him entirely, smother him in her tenderness.
‘Oh, Adam.’
She kisses him, takes his head between her hands and holds it to her chest. Adam wraps his arms around her waist.
‘Bugger me.’
Henry looks at them in disbelief.
‘Have I missed something here?’
‘Er. Yeah. Kind of.’
‘When did this happen?’
Adam and Eva roll into each other, giggling against the onslaught of questions and wisecracks from their two friends, so that none of them notice the sound of the carnage dying down as the fourth duck loses strength and lets herself sink underwater.
They have finished – well, Henry has finished – the Spicy Peking Duck. They have finished the guacamole, the brie, the Freixenet. They have explained what happened last night, how it all came to be, they have laughed at the innuendo, evaded the more indiscreet questions. Adam and Eva are out in the open, the wave of gossip about them has rippled around the college garden and is starting to die down now, and they do not know it but there is a handful of people whose hearts have been broken by that wave, distant admirers with crushed hopes that will never be revealed, and now Adam and Eva can recline on the banks of the river with her head on his chest or his head on her belly, and enjoy the warmth of the sun, of each other’s bodies, of this new entity which is the two of them, together. Henry and Carmen are also reclining, in their separate spheres, but maybe they will be pulled together too, eventually, who knows? Right now Eva is propped up on one arm, and Adam is propped up on the other and sort of curled around her, and they are, as often happens, listening to Henry hold forth to the increasing infuriation of Carmen.
‘I just don’t really see how anyone with half a brain could possibly vote anything other than Conservative.’
‘I don’t see how anyone under the age of sixty-five can possibly vote Conservative! What’s happened to your youthful idealism, Henry?’
‘I’m very happy to say I’ve never had any.’
‘Gah! I can’t deal with talking to you about this.’
How I Lose You Page 29