by Georgie Hall
PDAs have never been Paddy’s thing. The last time he held my hand in public was before Edward was born. I grew up with touch as a norm: cuddles, ruffling hair, stroking arms and backs. Touch. It’s like breathing. I can’t live without it.
In Paddy’s mind, touching is a private thing. The Hollanders didn’t ‘do’ physical affection.
For years our children compensated my need for cuddles, and Arty was there to step in when I was shrugged off by embarrassed teens and sensory-challenged Ed. While my sex-starved husband took my every affectionate touch as a cue for some rare bed action, Arty craved the straightforward touch of kinship, of affection. Instead of reaching out to touch Paddy, I’d stroke her.
I miss her warmth every day. I miss touch.
A courteous man taking my hand to help me step back on a path should be no more sexual than patting a dog.
Which makes it awkward that I find myself turned on by it.
As we walk on, Matteo tells me, ‘I downloaded one of your books.’ We are passing the RSC. Painful timing. ‘Last night, I fell asleep listening to your voice.’
I’m not sure what to do with that information. But I’m relieved when he reveals it’s an early one, a quirky historic novel that required minimal panting.
He asks what I like to read, a question guaranteed to keep 99 per cent of Finches talking nineteen to the dozen. I’m a beg, borrow and steal reader, grateful to my parents for the bedrock of classics that mean I’m not afraid of literary fiction, although I’m happiest with a comforting chunk of whodunnit. Matteo’s reading taste leans heavily towards spy thrillers – ‘I live those books! You must try. I will buy you one!’ – and when we move on to films he’s funny and enthusiastic and, like me, a big devotee of old Hollywood classics.
We’ve been so busy talking we’ve walked through Bancroft Gardens, crossed the canal footbridge and are already in front of the Gower Monument, Shakespeare cast in hot glossy bronze sitting high on his plinth, pigeon guano on his bald pate. At each compass point around the statue are four further bronzes of characters from his most famous plays. I hesitate by Henry V holding his crown aloft, gluttonous Falstaff the sexist dinosaur to our left, Hamlet the young overthinker to our right.
Behind us, the moorings in Bancroft Basin are striped with colourful narrowboats.
There’s no wise wizard Prospero in the Gower tableau, but The Tempest is floating so close by, we can almost see her.
‘Here’s fine,’ I tell Matteo, as though instructing an Uber driver to drop me off. ‘You get back; I think it’s about to rain.’ My next appointment isn’t until after lunch; I’ll sit it out on the narrowboat and form a masterplan.
‘I’ve nothing urgent,’ he says with that wide smile. ‘The marina is just across the road, no? The boat your family is selling is there, I think? I would love to see her.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve got to dash straight to another appoint—’ A flurry of digital camera clicks nearby distracts me. Somebody is photographing us, big black lens pointed our way like a weapon. A hand waves at me above it.
Lurking behind Lady Macbeth, smiling excitedly in a white bucket hat, is my polite Japanese stalker.
He takes a few more pictures of me, then he hurries over, miming eagerly, and before we know it Matteo has been handed the huge bit of digital gadgetry and is obligingly taking a shot of stalker and me lined up together by Henry V.
‘Matteo, I’m not very comfortable with this,’ I mutter as Mr Speak-no-English holds his hands above his head imitating the bronze prince with his crown.
‘Don’t be mean, bellissima,’ Matteo calls from behind the big black lens. ‘The man, he just wants a picture with a beautiful English rose in Shakespeare’s Stratford. Smile for me, baby! Arms up. That’s it! Beautiful!’
He thinks he’s bloody Mario Testino. But he’s so funny and enthusiastic, I throw a few poses, the silliness catching.
Our Japanese friend turns to me with the same drink mime he made last week. Then he points across the canal basin at the floating café barge.
I shake my head vigorously and point at Matteo, who is shouting, ‘Bella, bella! Love that pose! Now point at Shakespeare, yes? This light is terrific!’
His breath quickening, my stalker launches into another mime, pointing to Matteo and then pointing his pinky finger up with a wide smile and nodding a lot, as though questioning the Italian’s endowment. It might be a cultural thing, but it’s a worrying one.
Overhead, the sun is battling to hold out against a single black rain cloud, a downpour imminent. When Matteo finally hands back the camera to a flurry of ‘Thank yous!’ with prayer hands, he replies in Japanese, saying something that sounds like, ‘Doy! Tashi mashty.’ Show off. They’re soon having an animated conversation with more drink gesticulation and pinky finger pointing – at me this time – and then Matteo puts his palms up, shaking his head.
‘I’ll be off!’ I start to back away.
‘I come with you,’ Matteo says. When the tourist starts after us, he stops him with a mash up of Italian, English and Japanese, the only words of which I recognise are ‘Harry Potter!’
Perhaps it’s best to have his company until I put distance between myself and my camera-toting admirer. I set off as fast as my court shoes will let me, waving my stalker farewell, Matteo soon striding alongside.
‘You speak Japanese?’ I’m already out of breath.
‘Badly, but I pick a little up in Tokyo.’
‘What was he saying?’
‘He asked my permission to buy you a gift as a tribute to your acting talent.’
This strikes me as odd, although I’m quietly thrilled to have been recognised. ‘I wonder what he’s seen me in?’ (I’ve done some recent film extra work and a furniture warehouse sale TV advertisement.)
He chuckles. ‘Bellissima, he thinks you are Emma Thompson.’
Ten-year age gap aside, I elect to find this flattering. ‘Why did he need your permission to buy me a gift?’
‘He thinks we are secret lovers.’ He holds up his pinky finger.
‘I hope you put him right on both fronts.’ I realise I am now talking like Emma Thompson.
‘My Japanese is not so good. Now, show me this narrowboat.’
*
I once starred in a thirty-second television advert for an orthopaedic foot care brand. My character was a podiatrist in a white lab coat who gazed caringly over the big toe she was examining to reassure the public that, whatever the problem, we had a product to help everybody ‘enjoy life feet first!’.
The advert didn’t run long – the slogan ill-judged for the elderly target market – yet it remains one of my more visible career roles, and it’s the only time I’ve ever been recognised and stopped in the street, my advice on bunions, cracked heels and ingrowing toenails in high demand throughout 2014. People sometimes got quite shirty and accused me of duping them when I apologetically explained that I was an actor not a foot expert. I still occasionally get cornered by a member of the public eager to whip off a sock and show me a verruca. I now tell them I’ve been struck off the Chiropody Register for gross misconduct.
*
‘There she is!’ I point out The Tempest, hoping I can now make my excuses to escape back to the agency and drop off the flat keys.
But Matteo’s already striding along the jetty boards, beckoning for me to follow.
‘Che bello!’ He admires sixty feet of glossy red narrowboat, picture-postcard traditional from her harlequin-painted cratch to her tiny curved stern. Moored at the end of a row of six directly in front of the marina café bar, she is by far the most decorative and historic.
‘All my life I wanted one of these! Since Travelling Man, you know?’
‘Is that a book?’
‘Television series you make here in the UK. In the eighties.’
I apologise that I didn’t know it.
Matteo explains in the same breathless detail I might recount discovering Kids from Fame or Dynasty that it wa
s one of the crime shows that Uncle Antonio lovingly recorded on his rented Sanyo video machine to share with his family back home. For its two series, it was an institution in his corner of Puglia.
‘The hero, Lomax, he is a loner living on a chiatta and searching for his lost son.’ Matteo talks enthusiastically, his description peppered with Italian adjectives as he tells me of their adventures, from escaping arson to dodging an assassin’s bullet.
‘On a narrowboat?’ I try not to laugh. Here, I can guess why it perhaps lacked the enduring cult status of Bodie and Doyle’s occasional whizz across the Thames in an outboard inflatable, given that getting through a canal lock takes upwards of ten minutes.
‘It was very dramatic, very dark,’ Matteo insists. ‘He was pursued everywhere, always under surveillance.’
The prospect of trying to hide The Tempest from my brother until Wednesday makes me sympathise with Matteo’s TV hero. Miles would delight in giving chase.
Hearing a digital camera shutter, I glance round anxiously, but it’s a young couple taking pictures of the photogenic rainbow that’s arching through the sky over the sunlit boats as the shower finally breaks.
‘We can go inside?’ asks Matteo, stepping on the well deck, pulling up his collars against the raindrops.
It would be easy to lie and say that I’ve forgotten the combination codes. But then it occurs to me that I could use this opportunity to put the Italian off her, and by the time I’ve thought it, I’ve hesitated too long to lie convincingly. We’re both getting very wet now. The tourists are all cramming inside the café bar to get out of the rain.
I step on deck too.
‘There might be oily engine parts lying about,’ I warn. ‘Paddy was trying to get her going at the weekend. She’s pretty unreliable these days.’
Inside, the forward cabin is immaculate, sunlight still spilling in through the little rain-specked portholes onto the oak panelling on one side, clouds as dark as dusk the other. Like an ageing stage diva in need of flattering light, she suits this sort of chiaroscuro. Raindrops hammer on the wooden roof.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Matteo breathes.
Damn. How dare the family ark look so gorgeous? She was a tip two days ago.
He’s working his way through the boat, ooohing and ahhhing at the saloon with its cosy tartan furnishings and reclaimed elm, pausing to admire the little wood-burning stove in the corner, then on to that showcase galley kitchen with its one-lidded red range cooker, Belfast sink and full stave oak surfaces, all hand-finished with trademark Paddy Hollander class. This barge has been spared no detail in her English country nostalgia idyll. If they thatched narrowboats, she’d have it.
My mother might not be interested in barging – to my knowledge she’s never spent a night on board – but interior decoration is her passion. The old narrowboat had a distinctly masculine vibe before Mum stepped aboard with fabric swatches, everything tastefully chosen to complement her son-in-law’s exquisite woodwork. In return, Paddy crams as much of the soft furnishings in the cupboards as possible in case he gets them dirty. But today, everything’s back in its place.
‘You live the high life on here, eh?’ Matteo’s opened a galley wall cupboard to admire its black iron hinges, and I’m taken aback to see a case of champagne in it. Moet, no less, not the Aldi one bulk-bought by my parents. It must be Miles.
‘Cancel all your appointments, bellissima!’ He spins around. ‘We will get drunk! I love this boat! I want to toast her.’
He’s high on narrowboat, like he’s snorted Colombia’s finest off her gunwales.
‘Don’t shut the door, the lock sticks!’ I pursue him to the bathroom, which these days is more City-boy wet room than the stoop-and-sloop thunderbox it once was. ‘I promise you don’t want to get stuck in here,’ I warn. ‘Especially when the pump-out toilet backs up. The catch seizes, see?’ I flick it a few times while the door is open and it obligingly seizes up.
But he’s heading into the master berth, another showstopper.
‘Oof!’ I fall over a pair of discarded Italian loafers.
He’s lying on the bed. ‘I love it!’
It’s a great bed. A hand-carved two-poster in which, many moons ago, Paddy and I made love. A lot. Well, quite a lot.
‘I want this barge…’ He gazes at me intently.
I look away, appalled by his desire for something I’ve resented for so many years, yet feel honour-bound to save for Paddy.
‘She’s a museum piece,’ I mutter, pulling a cupboard door open and closed repeatedly to try to demonstrate its creakiness, but it’s freshly oiled and perfectly engineered. Hanging inside is a black, feather-trimmed basque, I realise in surprise, slamming it shut. ‘She’s got to that age where everything breaks easily.’ I tug violently at a drawer which glides open to reveal what looks like fluffy handcuffs along with a tub of something called Love Lube. I bang that shut too. ‘Something younger would be much more practical.’
‘I like maturity in boats and wine, dolcezza. And what else…?’ He waits expectantly.
I’m too distracted thinking about what I’ve just seen to play along. (It’ll be women, that worn-out cliché. Save it for my mother, Don Juan.)
‘People…’ He smiles.
I frown, opening the drawer a fraction to confirm I wasn’t imagining it, then close it. I wasn’t imagining it.
What I surely must be imagining is that this ebullient, playful Italian man remains draped on the bed for my benefit, smiling up at me like an aftershave ad in GQ.
And God help me, for the first time in years, I can feel that tick, tick, tick of attraction. It is so, so, so wrong.
*
Moral compass aside, my libido has lost its magnetic north. It would be too simple to say I’ve stopped finding men attractive in the way I once did, but they are rapidly becoming blurred out. The opposite of beer goggles if you like. Maybe one’s libido gets cataracts?
I’m worried that it’s just my possessiveness that makes me admire Paddy’s handsome features so often. Am I objectifying him? His physical presence still strikes me afresh, and often, yet I don’t desire him physically. My deep-frozen sexual drive’s not beyond our reach, I hope. The thaw will come. In the meantime, I don’t want anyone getting their mitts on him.
Is that supremely selfish? It feels like it. Especially right at this moment.
*
‘This bed is soooo comfortable, yes?’ Matteo is still smiling up at me, laughter lines drenched in ambient light. ‘You try?’
It sounds like an offer, although I’m certain it can’t be, not in broad daylight with a married oldie. Predictably, I’m hotting up once more, but not in a good way.
‘Yes, I’ve slept in it,’ I tell Matteo matter-of-factly. ‘Along with Paddy and our dog.’
‘You said you have no dog.’
‘We’re currently between dogs.’
‘A sad place to be. You must get another quickly.’
‘You sound like my husband.’
‘I hate your husband,’ he reminds me, stretching his hands behind his head.
It’s a badass move. I can feel my neck colouring, sweat trickling, and other bits of me revving up for once without the aid of Norah Jones and red wine. Please not here, in the boat, with this cliché of Italian flirtation, beneath which might be a man who’s chivalrous, witty and artistic, who speaks Japanese and in praise of older women, but who has no idea how this married one ticks. Tick, tick, tick…
‘It was me who wrote the TripAdvisor review,’ I blurt. ‘Not Paddy.’
‘You are very noble to try to take the blame, but I still do not like him.’ He extracts something from beneath the pillow that’s caught against his wristwatch. It’s a leather whip with long tassels, the sort designed to be drawn teasingly along excited skin. ‘Does he use this on you or the dog?’
I’ve never seen it before. The floor feels like it’s tilting, my legs wobbly. I sit down hard on the bed. Matteo bounces slightly, leather thongs fann
ing.
I can’t ignore this. First a cupboard full of unfamiliar champagne. Then lingerie, fluffy cuffs. Now this. I want to blame Miles, but I can’t believe lacy BDSM is my brother’s kink, whereas my Christmas baby-doll/negligee/garter set was an under-the-tree staple from Paddy once upon a time…
What has Paddy been up to? And with whom? And why oh why do I suddenly feel a reckless need to flatter myself with revenge?
I look at Matteo, femme fatale to fall guy. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’
‘You are upset?’
‘Not at all.’
He’s still holding up the bloody whip. ‘I can see it in your eyes.’
‘I’m just worried that I’ll miss my next appointment.’
I spring up gratefully as my mobile buzzes into life with Dad’s ringtone – ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ – and hurry up the steps through to the little boatman’s cabin to take the call, shutting the door behind me with a ‘must take this’ apology.
Dad is bad-temperedly impatient. ‘Miles tells me you’re in a tizzy? Truth is, Eliza, I’m getting too old for messing around on boats, and the trust splits the asset equally between you both; your sister never wanted part of it, so she’s taken the Tofanari bronze and Granny’s silver instead.’
Thirty pieces of silver for a traitor, I reflect murderously. Jules kept quiet about her level of collaboration.
‘If Antonio’s nephew wants to buy it, I say we sell it to him. Friend of the family and all that.’
‘Her, Dad. The boat’s a she.’ I lean against the stern doors, longing for fresh air, a familiar heat coursing up through me. Not again. But they’re padlocked on the other side. Behind me, I can hear Matteo moving back through the boat, whistling. I hope he doesn’t unearth any more of Paddy’s kinky treasure.
‘Your mother and I know you need the money, lass,’ Dad’s voice always slips into its original Yorkshire when he’s being overprotective. ‘We’re going to use the proceeds to buy you something you’re soon going to need very badly indeed.’
A private detective to investigate my philandering, Love-Lubing husband perhaps? Please God not a divorce.