It turned out he’d been booked by QAC into a very smart hotel, one of those in a private square just north of Oxford Street near Fanny’s office. But as I lit the gas I made my mind up. He wasn’t going anywhere for hours.
Or maybe days.
PATRICK
As I was fixing her computer, she fixed me fish and fries and something she called mushy peas. She said they were a British specialty. They looked like the kind of thing a sick coyote leaves in a backyard.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘The fish is excellent, the fries are great, but this green mess is pretty damn disgusting.’
‘I bet you haven’t even tasted it.’
‘You would bet right.’
‘Go on, be brave?’
‘I guess I’ll pass.’
‘You ought to try it just the once.’ She smiled at me, her lovely grey eyes bright. ‘You might find you like it.’
‘Yeah?’ I took a mouthful. I chewed it, swallowed it, decided I had made a big mistake. ‘I never tasted anything so foul.’
‘Okay, I’ll have yours.’ She grabbed a spoon, she scooped it up and dumped it on her plate.
I watched her eat.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d be jealous of a blob of – is there a polite expression for a food the colour and texture of a pile of radioactive shit?
‘You could finish fixing my computer while I do the dishes,’ she said briskly in that lovely British accent which did weird stuff to my inside and made me feel about thirteen years old.
I could imagine Rosie as a – what is it – Victorian memsahib out in British India, when Britannia ruled the waves – the viceroy’s lady, the collector’s wife or some such dignitary.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I replied and watched her blush. She looked amazing when she blushed. It was like the sun came up on a cold winter morning, like summer roses blooming in the snow.
I uninstalled some stuff she didn’t need, like half a dozen browsers she clearly never used and which were slow and useless anyway, ditto a bunch of other applications, then I opened up some folders.
‘Why are you keeping all this trash?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have duplicated files all over, downloads you could probably delete, a thousand photographs you could resize – you surely don’t need these three, for example, they’re about as big as billboards – and what’s with all these images of cupcakes?’
‘They’re for work.’
‘You need three hundred photographs of cupcakes?’
‘Well – maybe not three hundred.’
‘Why is your antivirus software out of date?’
‘I didn’t realise it was out of date.’
What is it with these people? Why are they determined to be functionally non-technological? If I’d never heard of William Shakespeare, they would laugh at me and say I was sub-literate. But do they know the first thing about Linux? What is Linux – that’s what they would say.
‘Do you always leave all this stuff open?’ I demanded, moving on.
‘Yes,’ she replied and shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Twitter, Facebook, Gmail – I asked you for your passwords, but you were logged in to all of them. When you’re done posting, tweeting or whatever, why don’t you log out?’
‘Does it really matter?’
‘So when you head out shopping or to work, you leave your front door open, do you, keys still in the lock and a notice Scotch-taped to the bell-push saying hey guys, come right in, take what you want?’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘So always, always, always log out of your email, website, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter – all that stuff, okay?’
‘Yes, Professor Riley.’
‘I’m not kidding, Rosie. You don’t want strangers prowling round your private stuff and spying on you, do you? Or sending dirty emails to your friends who might think they really came from you?’
‘No, of course I don’t.’ She made a rueful face. It was the cutest thing I ever saw, big-eyed and mock-repentant. ‘So – both wrists slapped and lesson learned, all right?’
ROSIE
‘When do you start work?’ I asked, as we sat on the sofa cradling mugs of coffee and I so much wanted to kick my slippers off and put my feet up on his lap.
‘Tomorrow morning. I have a breakfast meeting with the head of the department.’
‘I think it’s very mean of them, to get you working straight away. They should let you get over your jet lag.’
‘I don’t have jet lag. Or I don’t think I do. But I’ve never flown this far before. My longest trip until today was from Salt Lake City home to Minneapolis.’
‘How are you feeling, are you very tired?’
‘No, I’m wide awake.’
‘Shall we take in a movie, then?’
‘You mean go to the cinema?’
‘Ooh, you’re learning Britglish, are you?’
‘Yeah, I’m studying real hard. I read a British newspaper on my way over here, so now I’m good and ready for the whole UK experience.’
He smiled, and I thought, don’t smile. But then I thought, don’t stop.
‘I’d like to hear your London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by that Russian guy, Jurowski,’ he continued. ‘I also need to check out Blenheim Palace and Westminster Abbey and maybe Fingal’s Cave. Oh, and try some British beer to see if it’s as terrible as everybody says. It’s warm and flat, that right?’
‘I wouldn’t know. The only alcohol I drink is wine.’
‘I want to see the ocean, too.’
‘You’ve already seen the ocean.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You flew over it this morning, didn’t you?’
‘I guess I was asleep.’
He rubbed his eyes, then ran his fingers through his hair and I was jealous of his hair. Most men tend to make me wince or shudder, and for years I thought I must be gay, even though I didn’t fancy women. So perhaps I was repressed?
But I wanted to reach out and stroke Professor Riley, just like I remember wishing I could stroke a marble statue when I was in Florence once on a school trip.
This had to stop before I grabbed him. ‘Okay, we’ll head out to the movie theatre. We’ll go get the tube,’ I said.
‘You mean we’ll ride the subway?’
‘I mean we’ll take the London Underground.’
‘I kept seeing signs for that as I came over here. I thought it must be where your hobbits lived.’
‘You mean our Wombles.’
‘What in hell are they?’
PATRICK
There’s something about popcorn. The burning-sugar smell of it takes me back to necking in the back row of a movie theatre when I was fourteen.
But we adults weren’t necking like a pair of high school students, obviously. We were sitting like two grown-up people, our eyes fixed on the screen, our minds elsewhere. Or mine was, anyway.
I was a married man.
Whose wife had left him.
Who thought he might be falling for a British girl.
Who knew he’d fallen for a British girl.
Whose life and work were in the USA.
Whose kids might from now on be growing up in any country, in Europe, Asia, Africa, even the Middle East.
Who loved his kids and wanted to be in their lives.
Who hadn’t felt like this in two decades.
Who knew he was in love, which scared him half to death.
I tried to concentrate. I stared at moving images. I knew there must be voices. But I didn’t see or hear a thing.
ROSIE
Did we just see a film? What was it called? What happened? I had to know in case he asked me what I thought of it. So now I was slightly panicking …
‘You enjoyed that?’ Pat began as we came out of the multiplex into the yellow fluorescent drizzle of the London night.
‘Yes, it was great.’
&nb
sp; ‘What part did you like best?’
Somebody save me! Maybe I could faint? But I’ve never fainted in my life. What do you need to do to faint? I suppose you have to sort of slump? You let your knees give way and then you sink down gracefully, like a ballerina in Swan Lake, that kind of thing? I didn’t really want to sink down on that dirty pavement, gracefully or not. I was wearing my new coat from L.K.Bennett and my new black boots with three inch heels and lizard trim.
‘You first – what did you think of it?’ I asked, playing for time and thinking: please, give me a clue?
‘I’m sorry, Rosie. I think I must have dozed. I – hell, this is embarrassing, but I don’t remember much about it.’
‘Or anything at all, in fact?’
‘Or anything at all.’
‘You must be tired?’
‘I guess.’
He did look pretty shattered. ‘You should go to your hotel and get some sleep,’ I told him. ‘Let’s go back to mine and get your luggage and I’ll run you over there.’
‘There’s no need, I’ll find a cab.’
‘I’ll drive you, Pat. It isn’t any trouble, honestly.’
But he wouldn’t let me. He collected up his luggage and then flagged down a cab. He promised he would call tomorrow.
‘How did you get on today?’ I asked him when he rang the following evening, as he’d said he would. A man who kept his promises – this had to be a first. ‘What are your postgraduate students like?’
‘They’re pretty smart, I guess.’
‘You mean they’re very clever or they wear a lot of Burberry?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I was teasing – kidding you.’
‘I see.’ He didn’t sound amused. ‘This is the famous British sense of humour, right? What did you do today?’
‘I set up two new accounts. I made a lot of phone calls. I had lunch with Fanny and then I spent three hours with a woman who wants me to promote her range of toiletries for dogs.’
‘Dogs have toiletries?’
‘Of course they do. Deodorants, colognes and styling products like volumising lotion, hair conditioners for straight or curly, and thickening shampoo. All of them organic, cruelty-free.’
‘Yeah, I can see the world has need of all those things. Rosie, may I buy you dinner sometime?’
Say you’ll need to check your diary, I told myself. Say you’re very busy. But I took no notice of myself. ‘Oh, that would be lovely!’ I exclaimed, delighted.
Now my heart was doing cartwheels and I had to tell it to calm down. ‘When would you like to meet?’ I asked, still palpitating.
‘Well, I need to do some scheduling, but as soon as we can fix a date that suits us both? My kids are here in London with my wife. So I shall want to meet with Joe and Polly. But that will most likely be early afternoons.’
‘Did you know they’d be in London?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I see.’
I was so disappointed. He’d come to see his children. Well, of course he’d come to see his children! He was also giving lectures at the university. But, for just one idiotic moment – or, come on, be honest, make that several moments – I’d let myself believe that he had come to London to see me.
There are no wounds more painful than self-inflicted ones. I know that very well. But I’m good at beating myself up. I’m a world-class expert. Why not hurt myself some more?
‘Let me know when you have some free time,’ I told him. ‘We’ll do something more exciting than just meet for dinner.’
What did I mean by that?
‘I’ll call you back with dates and times,’ he told me. ‘You take care – speak soon.’
The line went dead.
PATRICK
Something more exciting – did she just say that?
What did she have in mind?
I wasn’t sure if this was wise. But then I told myself I didn’t give a damn about the wisdom of the situation. Yeah, I’d come to this damp little island to lecture college kids on speech-to-text and thought-to-text and see my children – right?
Who was I trying to fool?
ROSIE
Okay, back off, I thought. He’s married, he has children. So now cool it, girl, and let’s forget excitement. We’ll do something public and respectable. I’ll take him to the Globe. He might find the architecture interesting, even if he doesn’t want to see a Shakespeare play. Actually, you never know – he might. He said he was ready for the whole UK experience, and what could be more UK-experience-wise than Shakespeare?
When he got back to me with dates and times, I found my diary was chock-a-block. I made quite sure of that. We spent ten minutes saying things like no I can’t make Friday and I’m busy on the weekend and Tuesday isn’t any good for me.
But I still can’t understand how we arranged to meet on February the fourteenth. I must admit I hadn’t even noticed the shops were full of hideous pink cards and even more revolting stuffed pink animals.
I hoped Pat had failed to notice, too.
PATRICK
When she told me we were going to the Globe to see a Shakespeare play, I had mixed feelings. The Globe – I did some googling – yeah, that might be kind of interesting, to see how an Elizabethan playhouse translated to the twentieth century? As for the Shakespeare play – it would depend.
While I was in high school, we performed a Shakespeare play each fall, and parents came to watch us all make idiots of ourselves. Or anyway, some parents came to watch. My father never did, for which small mercy I was grateful. He would have jeered and mocked and sneered and said I was a faggot, to his mind the worst insult of them all. Then he would have beaten up on me because I was a faggot who had made a fool of him.
I always played a messenger, a herald or – upon one memorable occasion – part of a Scottish forest in brown leggings and a bright green wig. While Ben Fairfax ranted, yelled and strutted as Macbeth, I was festooned with branches. I and some other kids who couldn’t act were Birnam Wood that came to Dunsinane.
Tonight it was The Tempest. I never heard of it. It can’t have been in our school’s repertoire. I was prepared to hate it. But I loved it.
At school, we kids – even those who had some acting skills – had hacked and stumbled through the plays, snickering as we spoke the weird, old-fashioned words, which most times made no sense to us at all. But those British actor guys, they spoke them like they all made perfect sense, which obviously they did.
‘Thank you, that was great,’ I said, as we walked by the river afterward, the words still ringing in my head.
‘You really liked it?’
‘Yeah, I sure – I really did. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner. Where would you like to go?’
‘Come in for a while, Pat?’ she invited when we came back to her place.
‘It’s getting late. You need your beauty sleep.’
‘You’re saying I’m not beautiful already?’ Then she smiled flirtatiously at me. ‘Do you have an early start tomorrow? A breakfast meeting, is it? You could have breakfast here.’
‘Rosie, please don’t make all this so difficult for me.’
I could not take this woman in my arms. I could not kiss her on her lovely mouth. Somehow, I had to save my marriage because, if I did not, the chances were I’d lose my kids. But how could I save my marriage when it surely died last fall, when Lex went off with Mr Wonderful? Did Lex and I have any real hope of making up, of even being friends?
‘Our revels now are ended – is that what you’re telling me?’ said Rosie in the black velvet voice that warmed my heart.
‘I don’t mean that at all.’
‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. Or to put it less poetically, you’re a long time dead.’ She looked into my eyes. She ran her index finger down my chest and made me shiver with desire. ‘Someone told me once: if you want something, go for it. But if you want to end whatever’s happening now, before it eve
n starts?’
‘It’s not a question of wanting to end anything. It’s about not wanting to hurt somebody who means a lot to me.’
‘You mean your wife.’
‘Rosie, I mean you, of course.’
‘Getting hurt is part of being alive. If I can’t deal with being hurt, I might as well be dead. But if you want to go?’
‘I want to stay.’
ROSIE
Valentine’s Day, my birthday, all my Christmases in one – I felt like I’d won the lottery, the EuroMillions and Olympic gold.
Stop this, I told myself.
My other self said: why? This is all working out. It’s going to be all right. Just trust your female intuition.
Or should that be my wishful thinking?
Whatever – now I was in far too deep to have any realistic hope of climbing out again.
PATRICK
She made coffee. She was very good at making coffee. She had a cool black coffee-maker, a machine to froth up milk, and the result was perfect every time.
Guys at JQA who’d been to Europe had told me how it was impossible to get good coffee outside of the States. Those guys had lied.
She sat on the left side of the couch and I sat on the right. I drank my perfect coffee. I knew I ought to leave. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere tonight.
‘What about some music?’ she suggested.
‘No music.’
‘You like music.’
‘I don’t want any now.’
‘Okay.’ She started fussing with a bracelet on her wrist. ‘I can’t undo the clasp,’ she said. ‘It’s stuck, and if I tug I’m going to break it.’
‘Let me help?’ I took her hand. I held her wrist. The silver clasp was very small, and so instead of touching just the bracelet, my fingers also found the beating pulse on her warm skin. The pulse was fast, as fast as mine.
I’m not especially clumsy. But tonight my hands would not obey me. I gave up trying to undo the clasp. I held her wrist and checked the bracelet out. I turned it round and round, admired the fine engraving. I watched the burnished silver catch the light. ‘This is a lovely thing,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘It used to be my grandmother’s.’
‘She died?’
‘Oh no, she’s very much alive. But she can’t wear jewellery any more. She has bad arthritis and her hands and wrists are very twisted, very bent. This bracelet was a present from my grandfather so it’s been in the family for years and she said I should have it now.’
Magic Sometimes Happens Page 15