by Patrick Gale
‘Not really. I wanted to take time out and get some painting done again. The light is wonderful, even in a flat. There’s a nice bit out at the back where the kitchen is, with a glass roof and I paint in there when I can. But I’ve been doing a lot of child-minding for Clara — that’s his sister. She’s so nice, and Enrique — that’s the kid — is adorable. She pays me quite well. Cash in hand. But it does make it a bit hard to get on and paint sometimes because he keeps getting in the way or wanting me to play with him. Anyway for the moment it’s strictly cash jobs or letting Alvaro pay for everything, because I haven’t got a green card. I shouldn’t even be living there. We’re probably going to have trouble from immigration on the way back in.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘Alvaro’s asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘While we’re over here. He proposed in the departure lounge.’
Charlie paused a moment then frowned so that she wondered if the news had hurt him.
‘Just so you can get a permit?’ he asked.
‘I…er…I think there’d be more to it than that. He wants to make an honest woman of me.’
‘And I suppose he wants you to have his babies too.’
‘Yes, actually. I think he probably does. I should give it some thought. I’m not getting any younger.’
‘Then you’ll never get a job again. You know what your family are like; you’ll be permanently pregnant or breastfeeding.’
‘I’m not sure I want a job,’ she said defiantly. ‘I hate work. I’d quite like to lie back and have babies. I might write a book. I could write a book while they were sleeping.’
His pager bleeped, interrupting her. He apologized and went to call his surgery on a portable telephone. She ate on, watching him pace about in the far end of the garden as he talked. His voice was curt, slightly hectoring, the way she remembered it. It reminded her of disagreements they had suffered in the past and of the little things that made him that much easier to divorce. He used to correct her stories at dinner parties. He used to curb her drinking even when he was the one that was driving them home. When he returned, she was ready for a skirmish.
‘You knew Alvaro was over here with me,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you ask him over too?’
‘He was busy. You said he had meetings all day.’
‘That’s beside the point. You didn’t ask him.’
‘But I didn’t want to see him,’ he laughed, exasperated. ‘I wanted to see you.’
‘He noticed.’
‘Good. Maybe next time we meet he’ll be a bit more polite.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Maud, we had you both to dinner last time, at very short notice. And he barely addressed three words to Kobo — and those were only questions. Then he dismissed my work on the NHS as a waste of resources and spent the rest of the evening banging on about market forces and the power of the almighty dollar. He’s right wing.’
‘No he’s not. He’s American. They have a different system to ours.’
Charlie dismissed this with a snort, adding, ‘And he belittles you.’
‘He does not.’
‘He squired you around all evening. He always had a great hand clamped on your elbow or your arse. Treating you like a piece of property. It’s so Latin.’
‘Of course he’s Latin. He’s a Cuban. Anyway he loves me. He’s very physical. He likes to touch me in public. I like to touch him. You never touched me.’
Charlie froze for a moment in passing her the last sardine. She didn’t want it — the taste was turning acrid in her mouth — but she could not break in to say no in case her voice trembled.
‘Yes. Well,’ he said. ‘If you say so, but that night I think there was more to it. He was using you as protection. You probably couldn’t see it — why should you — but we both noticed it. Kobo’s especially sensitive.’
‘You’re going to say he’s uncomfortable around gays.’
‘Homophobic. He’s homophobic. His skin was crawling. He hardly ate a thing —’
‘He was getting over food poisoning.’
‘And his relief when he saw there was another straight couple — he practically congratulated them.’
‘I don’t see how you can say this. He works in an office surrounded by gay men. The place is run by Marys. He works for an entertainment corporation, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Precisely. And I bet not a day goes by when he doesn’t wish it wasn’t.’
‘How can you judge him like this?’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t even know him. You’ve only met a few times. How do you know he wasn’t just nervous? You’re always underestimating how scary people can find you. You’re a very intimidating man. And when Alvaro’s nervous he can get kind of aggressive and give a bad impression.’
‘So! His skin was crawling!’
‘Oh honestly!’ She gestured as though to brush his words off the air. ‘There’s no dealing with you when you’re being like this. Let’s just let it go and talk about something else. You don’t like him. Fine. The two of you will hardly ever meet in any case. It was naive of me to expect you to get on. I mean, the only thing you have in common is me, which is hardly grounds for a beautiful friendship.’
Indignant, she took a last, large mouthful of fish and chewed it vigorously by way of a full stop. Charlie collected a forkful of potato, dipped it in a pool of dressing then left it on his plate. He topped up the wine instead, his eyes lowered, his mouth pinched in a way she knew of old to bode only ill.
This was not part of her plan. She was barely across his threshold and they were arguing already. She had woken, dressed and travelled up here from the hotel with such high expectations, longing to see Charlie again with a true fondness, innocent of an ex-lover’s spite or insecurity. Since her spur-of-the-moment dash out to California the previous year, she had written to him regularly and he wrote back; they sent each other distillations of their mood and witty accounts of recent adventures. She noticed, however, that they avoided the less spontaneous intimacy of the telephone and judiciously edited their accounts of any material pertaining too closely to their respective lovers. Perhaps she was guilty of having sustained a fiction, withholding the whole business of Alvaro from his attention, the longer to sustain his old support.
The brutal truth was that Alvaro was the first lover since her divorce who had eclipsed Charlie, the first to have proved more than a divertissement, the first she loved more than she liked. She had met him while working briefly in the graphics department of his corporation’s London office. Wooing her with single-minded charm, seducing her with a kind of boyish greed, he had proudly overstepped her broken marriage rather than be intimidated by it. Divorce, her enduring love of Charlie and the overly protective eye her ex-husband kept on her had left her in an unromantic limbo, locked in a glass tower whence it took Alvaro’s forceful passion and, dare to whisper it, machismo to wrest her.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’ Charlie said, setting two small fruit brulées before them.
‘Because I’m not going to give him up just because you want me to.’
‘I never said I wanted you to give him up,’ he protested.
‘You didn’t need to. I could tell it was what you were hoping.’
‘I can’t pretend he and I have much in common.’
‘Evidently. But you can’t let that be a reason for me to give him up, any more than I’d expect you to give up Kobo.’
‘But you like Kobo.’ Charlie’s statement was half a plea for reassurance, allowing her anger to pass its peak.
‘Only because I went out of my way to get in a position where liking him would be possible,’ he said.
‘You make it sound hard.’
‘It wasn’t. Not really. Kobo’s easy to like. Kobo’s a charmer. Alvaro isn’t. Not with men. He’s Latin, as you say, and he tends to view men — gay men included — as rivals until they prove themselves not to be. This is delicious.’
‘You don’t think I burnt
the sugar too much?’
‘No. It’s perfect.’
‘Kobo bought one of those little kitchen blow torches for me on a trip to Brussels.’
‘As I say, he’s a charmer. Is this sour cream?’
‘Crème fraîche.’
‘Heaven.’
‘The beauty of it is the speed.’
The flawless puddings, caramel carapaces giving way to miniature marshes of raspberry, peach and ratafia, seemed to dispel the discord the smoking sardines had unconsciously unleashed. Obese for several years of her childhood before hormones taught her vanity, Maud had always laid herself open to the voodoo of food. The fizz of ripe mango on her tongue, the yeasty elasticity of warm white bread could improve her mood in seconds. Telling juxtapositions of taste — tender anchovies au vinaigrette laid across a waxy new potato, tayberries bleeding rich juice over a bittersweet island of chocolate parfait — could arrest her thoughts in their tracks, leaving her staring in speechless wonder at her plate. Some people were at their most vulnerable behind the wheel of a car or dandling a child on their knee. Those who understood Maud well knew that favours were best asked while she was eating. She emptied her ramekin in contented concentration then looked up at Charlie with refreshed affection.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘It’s the younger child in me, always wanting everyone I love to love one another. My mother was just the same — always trying to maintain a sort of umbrella of men about her. I’m always pathetically bewildered when it doesn’t happen, which is daft since there’s no earthly reason why it ever should. I mean, if Alvaro lived in London, all this would be more of a problem. You’d have to get on because I’d be forever bringing you together. As it is, you need never meet till my funeral. And even then, one of you can send apologies. But it’s sad if it means I see less of you. Do you mind? Can you face being kept in separate boxes?’
‘All I mind is his taking you away from us.’ Charlie muttered, lighting a cigarette from the barbecue. ‘I miss you. Especially when Kobo’s away. And he’s away so much nowadays.’
‘Darling.’ She squeezed his free hand then poured them the last of the bottle. ‘But I had to go. Even if you don’t like him, you must see that. I couldn’t have stayed here trailing after you two forever. It wouldn’t have been fair on Kobo, and it certainly wouldn’t have been fair on me. Fairies’ godmother is a thankless role.’
‘No one said anything about trailing. You could just have found yourself a bloke in London.’
‘Someone you approved of.’
‘Yes,’ he said then shrugged, crossly exhaling smoke as he saw the futility of his wishes.
‘I don’t think,’ she said carefully, ‘you’d have approved of anyone I fell in love with.’
‘I would,’ he insisted. ‘Michael Manners was all right. And I liked the one from that magazine. The one with the streak in his hair.’
‘Terry. Hmm. Yes.’ She smiled wistfully, recalling Michael’s statuesque legs and the little, childish sun tattooed around one of Terry’s nut brown nipples. Then she cleared her throat. ‘But neither of those was love.’
‘It looked like it at the time.’
‘Well believe me, it wasn’t. It was lust. Lust on the rebound. Great fun, very good for my morale but —’
‘Not love.’
‘No.’
She was not meeting Alvaro until early evening so Charlie disguised his medical bag in a rucksack and they took a walk. They headed up Highgate Hill to look in an antique shop then strolled around Waterlow Park admiring the warmth of the autumn colours and berating the dullness of the council’s planting schemes. Something was tickling the back of her throat and she kept pausing to cough into a handkerchief. He patted her on the back in an effort to relieve her discomfort then left his hand comfortably across her shoulder as they moved on beneath the trees. They talked of other things as they walked, chiefly of old friends and distant enemies, of books they had read and films they had missed. They stopped for a cup of tea in the park refreshment rooms before she caught a train back into town.
He said, ‘All right. We’ll give him one more chance if you like. But let him know he’s on parole.’
‘We could meet in a restaurant,’ she suggested, more relieved than she cared to show. ‘Neutral territory.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Should we invite some camouflage along?’
‘No point. He’s the one I should be talking to.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I so want you two to get on. Just a bit. You don’t have to become best friends or anything but he’s so clever and funny once he relaxes and he loves talking about films and exhibitions. He’s a very keen gardener too —’
‘Don’t push it,’ he warned her. ‘I said he’s on parole. We can dress down, go Dutch and steer clear of private medicine. But I’m only doing it for you, remember.’
‘I know.’
‘I know I should be happy you’re happy and I am trying to be, believe me, but if I don’t like him, I don’t like him.’
‘I know.’
Something — the staleness of the bun they were half-heartedly sharing, the long shadows on the grass outside or the too familiar sound of the waitresses squirting jets of scalding water into metal teapots — something began to cause her an ache of nostalgic regret. Possibly it was the unexpected sound of him backing down after taking a stand, touching in its way as the first time she noticed her father having to lever himself from an armchair or caught herself smiling encouragement as her mother unwittingly told her a piece of news for the second time. His pager bleeped again. He called his answering service on the pay phone then announced that he had an urgent house call to make and would have to leave her. He kissed her briskly on the lips and was gone, running off after a slowing taxi.
Gathering her things about her and walking out through the park and down to Archway tube station, she realized he had omitted to ask her response to Alvaro’s proposal. Promptly she felt her nostalgia sharpen into homesickness. This was where she belonged. She had missed autumn leaves, missed the sensation of a coat furled about her, missed living in a city with regular rain, where walking for the sake of walking and taking public transport were not regarded as little short of social dereliction. Now that she was emerging from her jet lag, she felt a bizarre sense of dislocation at staying in an hotel in what still felt like her home town. She needed to hurry back to Alvaro, reground herself in reality after spending a day so pointlessly rubbing her nose in the now irrelevant past.
She had thought that the tea had driven away the tickle in her throat but, coughing again, she found the irritating sensation had returned. It was not painful, not sharp. She knew from experience the little jabs a trapped fish bone inflicted, and the instinctive panic they induced. This was less intrusive. It felt as though something were lightly resting just beyond the back of her tongue. She coughed once more, standing to one side of the pavement to let people pass by. She swallowed. She felt it there again. She bought a packet of toffees at the station entrance. She sucked them, one after another, on the train back to the hotel, thinking to induce a little rush of saliva that would wash whatever it was into her stomach and safely away from the mouth of her windpipe, but whenever she swallowed, she felt whatever it was still there and, try as she might to concentrate on her paperback, her thoughts twitched back to the irritation like fingers to an itch.
By the time she returned to the hotel, she felt petulantly in need of comfort. However luxurious, the hotel room was desolately impersonal, not a place to linger on one’s own in a state of poignant indecision. Luckily Alvaro was already there, and he had missed her. His kisses tasted of coffee and beef. After Charlie, he seemed delightfully big and invasive; a great lunk of a man, her mother would have called him.
‘I missed you too,’ she said softly. ‘Hold me.’ He took her head in his hands and kissed her then she backed onto the bed and drew him about her like a human quilt. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.
How was your day?’
‘Cruddy,’ he said. ‘Men in suits talking too much. It looked so great out. I wanted to be out sightseeing with you.’
‘We had a nice walk around Highgate.’
‘Yeah? And how was lunch?’
‘Lunch was fine.’
She had promised herself there would be no more pretence now, no more dressing up the facts, no more telling them, ‘He said to say hi,’ or ‘He was really sorry he missed you.’ Some vestigial caution however prompted her to turn the carefully planned, too intimate sardine barbecue into something else. Barbecues, she had learnt, were the American equivalent of mowing the lawn. Barbecues, for American men, carried daddish, male, territory-marking, Labour Day connotations.
‘Bread and cheese and some soup and salad,’ she said and saw the corners of his mouth twitch downwards at the thought of so emasculate, meatless a meal.
He had made them a reservation for dinner and she had planned to lead him somewhere amusingly old fashioned for drinks first. It was time to shower and dress up but for one reason or another, because he was tense and she was cold and perhaps because they both needed some reassurance, they began to make love instead.
Alvaro was on the neanderthal side of hirsute. Charlie’s skin was pale and marble smooth, unambiguously Saxon, so she had been surprised, amused indeed, that the contrast already so evident in their natures should be extended to the nature of their flesh. ‘Oh. So my brother is a hairy man,’ she had murmured when she first unbuttoned Alvaro’s shirt; making the first of many literary references he failed to pick up.
While covertly regarding his hairiness as the mark of true manhood, just as he saw large breasts and fecundity as badges of womanly splendour, he treated it with a certain coyness. He liked Maud to shave the back of his neck to leave his nape boyishly naked and he habitually wore modest tee shirts beneath his unbuttoned shirt front, their whiteness enriching his golden skin. In bed, he was peculiarly sensitive to finding hairs in his mouth. Used to the vagaries of male taste, conditioned, in particular, by Charlie’s squeamishness, she offered to shave herself. He was horrified at the suggestion. He often did not wait for her to undress before burying his face in her bush and claimed that picking her hairs from his teeth was one of the few free pleasures left him. Rather, it was his own hairs that caused him trouble, as though finding them in his mouth were deadly proof of narcissism or a species of autoerotic cannibalism. Tonight he abruptly broke off in the middle of making love to her, picked briefly at his tongue, tried to continue but broke off again with an angry sigh.