Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘She can’t come,’ shouts Caro, and her voice cracks but she goes on. ‘I absolutely forbill it!’

  The fly is frightened. It beats wildly at the pane of glass which is never going to give way. I drop down on my knees by the side of Caro’s chair.

  ‘Caro, darling!’ I remonstrate. I take her hand. I look at the flush and rage on her face and suddenly I see it. Why, she’s like Johnnie! She’s like my baby, pulling back from my nipple because he was too angry with me to feed. And I feel my face shiver with laughter as we look at one another and I open my mouth to tell her about Johnnie. Even Caro will see that it’s funny, and then she’ll come out into the cool sweet garden with me…;

  But then there’s a jerk as she pulls back. I can’t hold her. Her head lurches over the side of the chair as if she’s going to be sick. She reaches down, scrabbling on the floor. I can’t see what she’s doing.

  ‘Why, Caro!’ I say and just then she rears up above me and I feel the rush of her arm coming up and the air shudders, then splits over me, but I’m still laughing about how much Caro looks like Johnnie as Caro’s face flares like a torch, roars up in light, goes dark.

  Sixteen

  Carborundum and knife flash in the air. Dull and bright steels scissor against one another. Nadine shivers, though the dark-panelled restaurant is warm and a wide colonial fan turns just above their heads. The waiter swivels his meat-trolley like a small stage, presenting it to the table. On the carving tray there is a sirloin, pure meat, bloody and muscular but bred for tenderness. The waiter poises himself, adjusts angles of knife and carving-fork, and addresses himself to the joint like a bullfighter, his dark face serious above his work. He cuts a slice across the joint and it falls juicily across the plate he has laid ready. The slice of meat laps over the plate. But that’s the point of this place. The vegetables are good but mundane. New potatoes, shelled peas, sliced carrots. There’s horseradish sauce made with freshly grated horseradish, and English mustard. The beef is of the finest quality, properly killed and correctly hung before being roasted in the huge joints which permit a unique combination of flavour and juiciness.

  Paul Parrett hands the horseradish to Nadine. She smiles, takes it and smears a dab on to the side of her plate, where it turns red from the oozing meat. Tony cuts his meat rapidly into narrow strips and swallows them efficiently. This is not Tony’s kind of restaurant at all, even though Nadine’s gathered that he’s paying for the meal. And even Tony can’t possibly have an arrangement here. There’ll have to be money put on the table. She half smiles, thinking of it, and Paul Parrett catches her eyes. His moist, incredibly quick dark eyes flicker about the table as if the whole thing is a private joke which he’s just about to share with Nadine. Nadine warms to him. He’s extraordinarily attractive, for someone who shouldn’t be attractive at all, with his round eyes and fleshy face. His photographs don’t do him justice. It’s the energy in him – you can almost hear it humming. And when he switches his attention to you the force of it stops you thinking whatever you were thinking about him. Since they’ve come into the restaurant she’s never once caught his glance sliding sideways towards the other tables, where there must be more important people he knows.

  He was at the table waiting for them when they came into the restaurant. Paul Parrett doesn’t need to make a point of arriving late. He knows what he’s worth, and so does everyone else. He’s shorter than Nadine expected. She’s seen him on TV, read the interviews and the gossip, seen the photographs and the cartoons. His face on the news was part of her coming into adolescence. He was always being given new jobs and smiling in Downing Street. Images stick in her mind: Paul Parrett going in and out of important doorways; Paul Parrett walking alone down a long white beach towards the camera, his dark body brisk against the waves; Paul Parrett speaking fluent German to his German opposite number, Paul Parrett on election night.

  Then there was the early life of Paul Parrett. Illegitimate war-baby, adopted into a small terraced house in the outskirts of Manchester, rising through scholarships, fast footwork and the assumption of public schoolboys’ effortless assumptions. Even someone who wasn’t interested in politics couldn’t help knowing about Paul Parrett. He took up space. He was still on his way up. Even before she met him, he took up space in Nadine’s mind. She’ll thought he’d be tall, but when he stood up to shake her hand he was an inch or so shorter than Tony. At once, that was the height to be. He was powerful all right, and although he was heavily built you could see how quickly he’d move if he had to. He was almost bald, but then he’d been bald since his twenties, she’d read in some profile or other, and so it didn’t seem to age him. He hadn’t compensated with a beard or a moustache. His eyes melted and twinkled at her as they shook hands and she smiled back.

  All this meat is going to send her to sleep. If she eats the whole plateful she’ll spend the rest of the evening in a stupor, digesting it. Nadine pushes her plate to one side.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?’ asks Paul Parrett, leaning forward to scan the barely touched slab of sirloin and the small blood-sodden potatoes.

  ‘I’m fine,’ says Nadine. ‘I’m not very hungry, that’s all,’ and she picks up her glass and drinks off the dark red wine which seems to taste very faintly of blood as well. Tony says nothing. Nadine’s never known him so quiet. He’s simply eaten his slice of meat and crossed his knife and fork very definitely on his plate. How on earth could Tony and Paul Parrett have got to know each other? Business, of course. But what? Paul Parrett’s on a different level completely.

  The wine tingles deliciously in her veins, right down to her fingertips. The heavy silver glitters and the white napkins are glossy under the lamps. One napkin has a tiny exquisite darn across its corner. It appears more luxurious than a perfect napkin, for who can pay for such darning to be done these days – and who knows how to do it? Nadine fingers the stiff linen, her head bent. She feels her body dispose itself in still curves, with soft flattering light breaking on the surface of her skin. Both men are watching her. It’s back again, that power she possessed in the bedroom with Kai, when she put on the dress. It floods her body. Or is it just that she’s had too much to drink? Paul Parrett mentions a film he has seen lately. Jesus of Montreal. Not a new film, it’s a few years old now. But he doesn’t get tired of it, because the photography is so good. All those shots looking down over the city. And the magic – had she realized there were so many magicians around then? Has she seen it? Nadine begins to explain about her job at the Warehouse and the chance this gives her to see films seven or eight times and really get to understand how each film is constructed, but Tony breaks in, interrupting her so crudely that it’s quite funny. He hasn’t seen Jesus of Montreal – what’s it about? Paul Parrett and Nadine both start talking at once, then both laugh and fall silent. But it doesn’t matter, because he is one of those people you can be silent with very comfortably. Being in his physical presence feels like doing something. He’s not having this effect on Tony, though. Tony is really on edge tonight. What’s the matter with him? She’s really making a big effort and paying a lot of attention to Paul Parrett, and she knows that’s what Tony wants. A few moments later the head waiter comes to Paul Parrett’s side with a note on a tray, and murmurs into his ear. Paul Parrett excuses himself, says it’s a bore, but it won’t take long. Now she can ask Tony what’s going on.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Tony? We were just getting talking.’

  ‘Nadine, for fuck’s sake, you don’t come here and talk about usheretting in a cinema. Look at the people.’

  ‘Ushering,’ Nadine corrects him automatically, then looks around. A wall of dark backs, white shirts, discreet, rumbling, authoritative voices. Dashes of colour: a bow tie here or a cummerbund there. The clientele is overwhelmingly male. The atmosphere is one of serious eating and talk, and it’s a little intimidating, but also a little absurd. However, Tony wouldn’t see that.

  ‘He doesn’t want to talk about y
our job,’ pursues Tony doggedly. ‘He wants to talk about you.’

  ‘He doesn’t even know me.’

  Tony crumples up his napkin and drops it on top of his knife and fork.

  ‘People can get to know one another, can’t they?’

  Suddenly and for no reason, she thinks of the boy in the alley. One minute he was alone, the next he had a job to do, a home, someone taking an interest in him. He was taken inside to where there were lights and warmth and proper meals, not a padding of newspapers, a hamburger and cans of lager. And look at the way she’d met Kai. If anyone’d been looking at it from the outside, they’d have thought it was a pick-up. But from the inside, you know how things really are.

  Paul Parrett’s dark-suited arm brushes her bare shoulder as he comes back to the table. He looks refreshed, like a man who’s slipped in an extra couple of drinks while pretending to go for a pee. But she doesn’t think he’s a drinker. He likes wine, but he’s left his glass a third full for over half an hour now.

  ‘Time for pudding,’ he announces, his eyes glistening. Even Tony brightens, but one look at the trolleyful of treacle tart, bread and butter pudding and jam roly-poly and he slumps back in his chair, clearly itching for a cigarette. Paul Parrett scans the trolley and asks, ‘Isn’t there any summer pudding?’ and then to Nadine, ‘The summer pudding is wonderful here. You must try it.’ The waiter frowns with mortification at being caught with an empty dish. He sends an acolyte off to the kitchen to fetch another pudding and it arrives whole and perfect on a plain white plate, moulded and pressed into shape.

  ‘They put an iron weight on top of the plate overnight,’ says Paul Parrett with satisfaction. The first slice is for Nadine. It comes out in layers of red and pink, the bread almost jellied with seeping fruit juices, the raspberries and redcurrants and blackcurrants crushed, releasing their fragrance into the bread. There is special cream to go with it, so thick it has to be cut with a knife. Nadine tastes the pudding. Tart fruit, sweet juices, bland bread, a coating of cream. It is almost too good to swallow. Then it’s gone.

  ‘Would you like some more?’ asks Paul Parrett.

  ‘Yes, please. It’s wonderful. You ought to try this, Tony.’

  ‘You’re hungrier now,’ says Paul Parrett, as the second slice slithers on to her plate and Nadine cuts into the cream. The wine waiter has brought Sauternes and she swallows alternate mouthfuls of sweet wine and pudding. The meat and the clouded red-wine glasses are whisked away and forgotten. Perfect. She sighs with pleasure. A third slice perhaps? No. It would be too much. It would spoil it. Paul Parrett is watching her attentively. She lifts her glass to him. Tony looks positively ill with bad temper. If he’s enjoying the evening as little as this, Nadine wonders why he bothered to set it up in the first place. It’s not going to be cheap.

  ‘Coffee somewhere else, don’t you think?’ says Paul Parrett. ‘What about coming back to my flat? It’s warm enough to drink our coffee out on the roof-garden.’

  It sounds a great idea to Nadine. The day is turning out well, after such a bad start. They must do it again. If only Kai was more sociable. All he ever wants to do when he isn’t working is to stay at home, mostly in bed, mostly asleep. It was so different when they first knew each other. But Paul Parrett is saying something to her. She jerks her attention back to the table.

  ‘… all right by you, Nadine?’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine. There’s no rush – Tony’s booked our hotel, haven’t you, Tony?’

  He nods gloomily. He ought to have shaved before they came out. A man like Tony really needs to shave twice a day. The dark shadow on his cheeks isn’t very attractive in this fight. Paul Parrett looks so fresh, so vigorous and newly bathed. He smells very faintly of soap and an astringent cologne she doesn’t recognize. The waiter comes up with the bill and presents it to Tony, who pays with twenty-pound notes and a faint air of reluctance which Nadine hugs to herself gleefully. Only she understands it. It’s not really that Tony’s mean, but he does so much prefer to come to an arrangement. Paul Parrett winks at her, a lightning wink. She loves people who wink.

  At the restaurant entrance Nadine looks out for a taxi, but the next moment a Jaguar pulls up at the kerb, with a driver in it. I suppose they have to have Jaguars, thinks Nadine. British cars.

  ‘Here we are,’ says Paul Parrett. ‘Jump in,’ and they do, Tony in the front by the driver, Nadine and Paul Parrett in the back. The car pulls away and Nadine leans back luxuriously, breathing in the smell of leather. Nobody speaks. She shuts her eyes for a second. Are they touching, or not touching? She thinks she feels his arm brush against her coat. The car swerves and they lean together, then apart. Tony says abruptly, ‘I got to get back to the hotel to make some phone calls. If you drop me, I can get a taxi.’ His voice sounds strange. Maybe he’s drunk more than she realized – or is he ill? He’s been so quiet all evening.

  ‘We could do that,’ agrees Paul Parrett calmly. A slight shock goes through Nadine. It’s the word ‘we’. The coupling of her name with Paul Parrett’s. Excitement sparks through her.

  ‘But Tony,’ she says, ‘I don’t even know where the hotel is. You’ll have to give me the address.’

  Tony scribbles on a bit of paper and passes it back to her.

  ‘Any taxi-driver’ll know it,’ he says. ‘Make sure you get a black cab, not a minicab.’

  ‘My car will take her,’ assures Paul Parrett, then he leans forward and tells the driver to pull in where he can. Cabs go up and down here all the time, he tells Tony. The car slides into a gap; Tony opens the door and gets out. He glances into the back of the car, but doesn’t really look at either of them. ‘Goodbye, Nadine,’ he says, and slams the car door. How strange – he hasn’t said goodbye to Paul Parrett, after arranging the dinner for him. As the car accelerates away from the kerb, she looks back and sees Tony walking off fast, his head down. Luckily, Paul Parrett isn’t in the least bothered by Tony’s departure. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in Tony at all, which makes the grouping of the three of them at dinner seem even more random now than it did at the time. Of course it’s a business connection, not a personal friendship, but even so…; Paul Parrett leans back expansively in the dusky rich interior of the car.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he says. They haven’t driven far. They must still be in Westminster. There’s the river down there. The car swings in abruptly and dives down into an underground car park. There is a security check, and then they are inside and the driver is parking the car in a brilliantly lit space. He comes round and opens the door for Nadine. She wanders a few yards, as if across a floodlit stage, while Paul Parrett says something to the driver. Then Paul Parrett leads her across to an internal door, past another security man who looks steadily at Nadine, registering her image in his brain for the future. They get into a lift which shoots up to the fifteenth floor in a disturbing muffled silence. The building is new. Even the planes of the lift are beautifully moulded. There is a large print of fish on the wall. She reads the title: 3 Poissons Minces. A mirror on the opposite wall makes slim vivid fish swim up the building beside them, bright as petals.

  When they get out they walk across the corridor to a door of heavy pale wood, with a tiny camera eye winking beside it and a system of alarms which Paul Parrett defuses with what looks like a credit card. Inside the flat it is dark. There’s a big, wide, dark space in front of her, not a hall or lobby. Hesitantly, Nadine steps after Paul Parrett into the room. A light springs on, not inside the room but outside, beyond the windows. She breathes in sharply, can’t help herself gasping aloud at what she sees.

  In front of them there is a wall made entirely of glass. Yet it’s framed by the black shadows of leaves, and a small, perfect and formal garden is floodlit just outside, as if floating in the air above London. There are tubs of bay and orange trees, white jasmine trained to wreath round circular frames, glowing troughs of strawberries and cherry tomatoes, roses in tubs, low rosemary and lavender hedges clipped round gravel wal
ks. The leaves move gently.

  ‘There’s always wind up here,’ says Paul Parrett.

  Beyond, there is the wider frame of the city’s tarnished orange skies. Headlights crawl up and down choked streets. Then there are bright necklaces of bridges and the dark stain and reflection of the Thames. Paul Parrett goes forward and unlocks the double-glazed french doors to the roof garden. The air is warm but breezier than down on the streets. Vine leaves around the door flicker, and the smell of tobacco plants blows past Nadine.

  ‘Wind is the problem up here,’ says Paul Parrett. ‘That’s why I have all these hedges. They slow it down. Fencing doesn’t work as well. It creates currents and the wind force increases. That damages the plants. They burn and they bruise, even if they don’t break.’

  He touches the petals and leaves of his flowers as he walks, familiar, not needing to look to know where they are. It is like watching him run his hands over the body of someone he’s loved for a long time.

  ‘Have a strawberry,’ he says. ‘These go on fruiting right into September.’

  The berry is small, but its flavour is far more intense than the commercial strawberries Nadine knows. It takes her back to the strawberries her grandfather grew by his greenhouse, dark red and brilliantly seeded with yellow. She never dared take one without asking. Crushing Paul Parrett’s strawberry under her tongue, Nadine walks after him to the edge of the garden.

  ‘Careful,’ he says. ‘There’s only a low wall,’ and he takes her arm to steady her. The wall is below her waist.

  ‘I sleep out here sometimes, in summer,’ says Paul Parrett. The words seem to go on moving in her after they’ve died in the air. I sleep out here.

  ‘Is there security out here too?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s all very safe. Don’t worry about it.’

  Nadine glances back. Behind, by the french doors, another little TV eye points at them.