“I was, very hungry. Not eaten all day.”
“Anything else you’re hungry for?” With this, the waitress undoes the buttons of her blouse very quickly, revealing her brassiere and the plump, rounded tops of her breasts.
She laughs. “You look shocked sir for a married man. Haven’t you ever seen a pair of titties before?”
Idris gets up hurriedly. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d best go upstairs to my wife.”
“Oh yes, your wife.” The waitress does her buttons up slowly. “Pity. You’re a looker you are. If you change your mind, I’ll be in the kitchen for a while yet.”
Idris takes the stairs back to the room two at a time.
Jean has left the door on the latch and for the first time since they checked in, it dawns on Idris that the room, booked for a married couple, has only a double bed. When he pushes the door open gently, he sees that Jean is sleeping as far as possible over onto one side of the bed. Idris kicks off his shoes and lays down fully clothed on the other side of the bed on top of the bedclothes. Even with the excitement at the sight of those splendid breasts running through his mind, he falls asleep immediately.
*
When Idris wakes up the next morning, Jean is already up and dressed, her hair neatly brushed.
“Good morning, Idris,” she smiles.
“Good morning, Jean. You’re up bright and early.”
“I’ve got an interview, haven’t I?”
Idris accompanies Jean on the walk to her interview with Mrs Meikle.
“May I take a walk around the garden while I wait?” he asks the housekeeper.
“By all means. I’ll get a message to Mr Wragg, the head gardener, to let him know.”
Idris has never before seen anything as beautiful as this house and its gardens. Attached to the house is a large conservatory that Idris can see contains numerous tall palm trees. There are wide manicured lawns and many other smaller greenhouses containing flowers of all sorts that Idris cannot begin to name and does not think that his mother would be able to either. There are secret little corners where two people could sit together and talk and not be overlooked, pools with fountains and waterfalls and a long lily pool completely surrounded by a high, white, lattice fence. At one end of the pool is a marble sculpture of three naked women and it is while he is contemplating this sculpture and concluding that it reveals more of the naked human form than he has actually seen in the flesh, that Idris encounters Mr Wragg.
“Well there you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere since I got the message from Mrs Meikle. I’m Mr Wragg.”
“Pleased to meet you sir. I’m Idris Maddox.”
“What do you think of my girls then?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“The girls, over there.” Mr Wragg motions to the marble sculpture. “They’re The Three Graces. A replica of the ones done by Antonio Canova. He did one for Empress Josephine and another for the Duke of Bedford in the 1800s. Glorious aren’t they?”
“Glorious,” Idris repeats.
“Come, come, it’s not the formal gardens that you’re interested in. It’s the kitchen gardens you’ll want to see.”
Idris does as he is told and follows Mr Wragg. The kitchen garden is very different to the structured formality of the other parts of the garden and much more familiar to Idris. Like his mother’s garden but on a far larger scale, this area is crammed with vegetables and fruit trees. There are greenhouses here too, smaller ones, steamed up inside, in which tomatoes grow and lettuce and beds of cutting flowers.
“So tell me about your gardening experience, then, son.”
“I only know what I’ve learned from my mother. She grows vegetables mostly. Carrots, potatoes, turnips and parsnips. A few roses. Mostly what I know of gardening is digging and weeding.”
“Well that’s all I really need you to know. Everything else I can teach you. I’ve got eleven greenhouses and 24 gardeners to look after. I’m most interested in whether a man’s arms and back are strong enough and fit enough to do this job and I can see that yours are.”
“I’m sorry Mr Wragg but there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not here for the job of under-gardener. I have a job already, on the railway viaduct in Toronto. It’s my friend who’s here to apply for a position as a maid.”
“And what strapping young lad such as yourself would prefer working in smelly, dirty Toronto in the dust and noise of building a viaduct, to working with me in these beautiful gardens, digging the good clean dirt, outside in the fresh air morning till night. You tell me that, eh? And close by his sweetheart too. This is a fine place to work Mr Maddox for a man who’s prepared to work hard. What about it then?”
“Jean’s not my sweetheart. She’s just my friend.”
“If you say so, son. If you say so.”
“She really is just a friend, Mr Wragg, and one whom I hope will be lucky enough to be working here very soon so that I shall have an excuse to visit your gardens again.”
“Well I shan’t waste any more of my time on you then, Mr Maddox,” Mr Wragg says, not unkindly. “Please take a seat on the bench over there and I’ll let your friend know where to find you when she is done.”
Within fifteen minutes Jean is walking towards him.
“How did it go?” he asks, as she takes a seat next to him.
“Really well. Mrs Meikle has offered me the job. She doesn’t even require references. Says that us Scots need to look out for one another. Even so, I don’t think I will be mentioning to anyone that I’m a Quarrier child. That part of my life is forgotten now.”
“It’s wonderful news, Jean.”
“It is, isn’t it? I am fortunate, thanks to you. This house belongs to a famous man. Colonel Samuel McLaughlin, the boss of General Motors Canada. Mrs Meikle says that the Colonel and Mrs McLaughlin are kind people to work for and take good care of their staff. They have five talented, much loved daughters, all grown up now, and the youngest recently gone off to finishing school. The house feels a happy one to me.”
“I am very glad to hear it. When do you start?”
“Today. Right now.”
“You won’t be coming back on the train with me?” Idris is surprised how very sad the idea of making the journey back to Toronto without Jean makes him.
“I think it will be easier for me this way. I will write Mrs Williams a note – tell her again how very grateful I am to her and to Mr Williams, ask her if she would be so kind as to parcel up the beautiful clothes she has made for me and send them on.”
“I’m sure she’ll be happy to do that. Mrs Williams is going to miss you, Jean.”
“And I am going to miss her.” He can hear the emotion in her voice. “But nowhere near as much as I am going to miss you, Idris.”
He reaches out and takes her hand in his but does not look at her, keeps his gaze fixed firmly on the lawns ahead.
“I shall miss you too, Jean, very much. We’ll see each other again, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I do hope so,” she says, removing her hand from his. “Goodbye till then, Idris.”
*
All the way back to Toronto on the train, Idris can think of nothing else. He knows exactly what he must do. As soon as the train pulls into Union Station, Idris is opening the train door and hurtling himself out before the train has even stopped moving. He runs down the platform and out of the station. If he runs all the way, he should make it to Dewi Sant before the end of evening service. He cannot wait to see Aeronwen’s beautiful face again and make everything right between them.
He arrives at church, his shirt sticking to his back with sweat. He is aware that he makes too much noise when he enters the church. Many of the congregation stare at him and he knows he looks a sight in his damp shirt with the sleeves rolled up and that Mrs Williams will be disappointed in him. But it is worth all the embarrassment to see the look on Aeronwen’s face when she sees him. She cannot conceal her delight at seeing him or the loo
k of longing in her eyes. When the service ends some minutes later he waits for her by the door and watches as she elbows her way past her parents and sisters, pushes her way through the other worshippers, patiently filing in a slow, neat row to leave the church. By the time she reaches him, she too is breathing heavily.
“Has she gone? Have you come back to me?”
“Jean has gone, yes. But Aeronwen I never left you. I was trying to help her is all. I was always here. Right here.”
Aeronwen throws herself into his arms. She is light and he lifts her easily. He kisses her, full on the mouth, and she kisses him back hard. More than one lady leaving church gasps in shock.
He puts her down gently. “Will you marry me, Aeronwen?”
“You’re meant to ask my father first.”
“It’s not your father I want to marry!”
“You still have to ask his permission.”
“And I will. But first I’m asking you. Will you marry me?”
“I will Idris, I will.”
Chapter 17
When he met her, on their first day of law school, the thing that had bowled Gareth over about Rachel was how unfamiliar she was to him. The otherness of her. She was uncharted territory and the conquest of her had been thrilling.
He had been attracted to her immediately. Not just the way she looked, in fact not the way she looked at all. All his other girlfriends had been petite and brunette. And Welsh. And here was Rachel, tall and red headed and English and clever. Very clever and not afraid to show that cleverness off either. Teasing him about his Welsh accent and quoting Under Milk Wood at him.
“I will knit you a wallet of forget me not blue, for the money to be comfy,” she’d said, in a breathy tone, that had made the hair on the back of his neck prickle. It was the first time Dylan Thomas had ever meant anything to him.
He hadn’t known when they’d sat next to each other that first day that the seating plan for the remainder of the year was being set in stone. But the next day, without discussing it, everyone sat back down in exactly the same seats as they had the day before and every day after that. Rachel and Gareth, sitting side by side, from September till June the following year.
When she mentioned during that first week that she had a long-standing boyfriend whose name was Will and that she was going to visit him that weekend, for some bizarre reason he’d felt shocked and hurt. Just because he was single following the break up of his last long term relationship in the third year at university, why should she be single? Most of the people at law school were in long-term relationships. Why had he assumed she wasn’t? Most probably because of the way she teased him about his accent and laughed at his jokes and caught his eye from time to time in a flirty way, which he had hoped was a reflection of his own attraction for her.
“Good weekend?” he’d asked, nonchalantly, the following Monday.
“Great thanks. You?”
“Very good.”
In fact, he’d missed her. Ridiculous. They’d only just met, had only had coffee together round and about lectures, not even been for a drink. And he’d missed her all weekend long.
So he set out to get her, to prise her away from her Will, who had just started training to be a chartered accountant in Southampton. It was hard work training to be a chartered accountant – long days at work during the day, studying at night – and Will was careless and complacent with Rachel’s affections. Work and his exams came first and Rachel needed to fit round those two priorities. Gareth put Rachel at the very top of his list and he wooed her fiercely. Weeks of walks in the park and drinks in the pub and long lingering looks while trying hard to beat her at their coursework.
He remembers vividly the first time he saw her naked. Her face freckled but the rest of her body so very pale. Alabaster is how her skin would have been described by poets but to Gareth it was like skimmed milk, so pale it had a bluish tinge. Her pubic hair, fiery red against her skin, had shocked him.
The way she approached sex was also different to anyone he’d met before. Rachel was much more focussed on her own orgasm than anyone else he’d ever slept with.
“Not like that, like this,” she’d instructed him in those early, guilty days, when Will had all but lost the battle he didn’t even know he was fighting. She’d put her hand over his hand and shown him how she wanted him to move his fingers over her. “Slower, deeper strokes, like this. Don’t try to flick me on and off like a light switch.”
This had put him off his stride at the beginning. But the things she showed him worked. They always worked. And because they worked for her they worked for him. Rachel had taught him how to make her come within minutes if he wanted. And then he’d come, immediately after her.
Lots of studying and lots of great sex. That’s how Gareth remembers law school. Whenever people complained about how awful that year of exams had been and how they would never want to have to live through that ordeal again, all Gareth could do was smile and enjoy the memory. There had been a couple of weekends of tears, over the course of which Will finally got dumped and was considerably more hurt than Rachel had expected him to be. One long night he turned up outside Rachel’s flat and called her on the phone, over and over, begging her to come outside and talk to him. Gareth was all up for going out there and talking to him himself until finally Rachel went and sat in Will’s car for a while. Gareth watched from the window, his insides turning, coiled tight and ready to rush out and physically fight for Rachel if it was called for. Even though his last fight had been at primary school and he’d lost. He watched while Will pleaded with Rachel and banged his hands down on the steering wheel a few times; Rachel talked calmly to him, shaking her head throughout. Finally Rachel got out of the car and Will drove away and when she came back inside with tears in her eyes Gareth took her by the hand and led her into her bedroom and made love to her till they both felt better.
After that, they hadn’t looked back. Gareth and Rachel, side by side, for the rest of that year and every year since. Working hard and raising a family together. Getting the domestic chores done. Laughing and eating and drinking and still having sex. Happy ever after the random act of choosing where to sit in law school.
And now there is no otherness about Rachel any longer. Her body is as familiar to him as his own. How she looks when she is pregnant, or has just given birth. How she looks when she cuts her toenails or cleans her teeth or puts on her tights, the concentrated look on her face as she eases the tights over her calves and then her thighs and finally over her belly button, snapping the elasticated waist with her thumb in satisfaction at having got them on without laddering them.
The steps they each take in the dance of lovemaking. What he does to Rachel and what she does to him. The way she looks at the moment she comes. The exact same look every time.
Rachel and Gareth. Gareth and Rachel. Extensions of each other, parts of the same being. Like the way a person can clap their hands, even in the dead of night, and never miss. They have been together so long that being with Rachel is as instinctive and effortless and as vital to life as breathing.
Cassandra Taylor is other to him, in the way that Rachel once was, so many years ago. Unknown, unexplored, even though Gareth has spent a lot of time today talking on the phone to her or emailing her. She had made the first phone call by 9am.
“Can I ask your advice on something?”
“Of course, that’s what you pay me for.”
“I’m not expecting to pay you for bouncing ideas off you. I consider that to be one of the added value services which all you lawyers should deliver free of charge.”
“Fire away then – at no cost.”
“What would you say to Perfect opening its own stores?”
“I’d ask whether you really need your own shops when you have concessions in most of the major department stores.”
“Good question. But the amount of space a department store will give us is limited, they are expensive and we can’t expand our offering. Our
own shops, as you call them, which is a far cuter word than stores by the way, will give us more control.”
“So have you looked at rental costs or done any other budgets?”
“Not yet. It’s still at the blue sky thinking stage at the moment.”
“Well, where do you have in mind?”
“Notting Hill or Chelsea.”
“Expensive.”
“Very. But I think we’ll be able to make it work and achieve more customers and more sales. In-store browsing will also drive up online sales.”
“What are the risks? Cost of course. But will you be prejudicing good relationships with the department stores? Biting off more than you can chew at a time when you already have large new projects on the go?”
“One thing you will learn from working with me is that biting off more than I can chew is what I do. I function at my peak when my mouth is too full.”
She pauses here and on the other end of the phone Gareth is wondering if she too is thinking about that kiss outside a London pub. He feels himself stiffen again as he had done that night.
“Are you there?”
Gareth gathers himself.
“Yes, just thinking. I suggest you get on to some London agents, get some prices, do some budgets and forecasts of likely sales. When you put your blue sky thinking in terms of cold hard cost it will help you make your mind up.”
“I agree. Already on it. I’ll get back to you. Thanks for your input. It was constructive.”
And so it had gone on all day with phone calls and emails, discussing heads of terms and contractual clauses, negotiations and new ideas, compiling checklists of things they need to discuss while she is in Wales next week doing the site visit, how she wants him to come on the site visit with her given his personal knowledge of the area. Gareth’s inbox is full of Cassandra Taylor but his head is even fuller. Despite being able to detach himself enough to do his job, in every single one of his exchanges today with Cassandra Taylor the issues running through his mind on a loop have been Did you go out for dinner with Adrian? Did you kiss him like you kissed me?
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