Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  ‘Go to bed with him,’ she said, a lilt to her voice. Her hands started to play the melancholy music with sharp precision. Her cigarette lodged in the corner of her mouth. ‘Just make sure you get what you want out of him. Don’t tell yourself it’s about love. Because it’s not.’

  I wondered about this: I pored over her words, for days afterwards. How could she be sure I wasn’t in love? Wasn’t I? The way he picked me, the way he pulled me out of myself and into something so new, wouldn’t that prompt me into love? Whatever love meant, whatever love was, I thought I had it, I thought I could taste it. I thought if I kept going it might appear to me as a realisation or a dream, or an imagining. If I only carried on, it would surely take a solid form in front of me. I studied her words and my thoughts, I analysed every facet of my feelings. I worried about it.

  I needn’t have bothered. I didn’t realise at the time that she was talking about his feelings, and not my own.

  Jaminder carried on playing and I decided to find George. I walked out into the hallway again, hoping to check on Gloria on my way, and found her and Gwendolyn facing George, standing outside the toilet, gesturing towards him. I stopped by the drawing room door. Gloria was yellow and sickly looking, her hair a matted mess upon her head, and Gwendolyn was perfectly composed, arms crossed, levelling George’s gaze. Gloria grasped Gwendolyn’s hand in defiance, her usual cheerful disposition gone.

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ she said to George, not letting go of Gwendolyn’s hand.

  ‘Give over, Gloria, it’s just a bit of friendly advice. To settle down, that’s all,’ he said.

  Gwendolyn laughed mirthlessly. ‘Am I a fallen woman?’

  ‘It’s a warning, that’s all, a polite warning,’ said George.

  ‘Oh piss off, George,’ Gwendolyn said, her pink mouth sweet and mocking. ‘The lot of you can just sod off.’

  Gloria tugged at her hand again and, not giving another look towards George, pulled her away from him and up her sweeping staircase. ‘Come on, Wendy Darling,’ she trilled, and they both laughed, head turned towards each other in glee.

  George ran a hand through his hair and turned towards the door, spotting me for the first time. He shrugged, and I walked towards him.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just …’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Some people just can’t take a hint. Ready to go?’ He put his hand in mine.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Ready.’

  3

  We took the underground back to his house, near St. James’s Park. It was far from my own, but he told me I could call my grandmother from his telephone, tell her I’d been caught up, and would stay at Gloria’s house, to return the next day. I did, and still remember my grandmother’s small, worried voice, asking me if I was okay. Of course, I said, I’m very well. It’s late. She told me she’d saved me dinner, cottage pie, sans lamb. She spoke to me in French, and I replied in English, as I always did. Tout va bien? She asked again, in her mother tongue, and I in my own kind, Yes, I’m fine, I’ll see you in the morning.

  The thought of leaving her even for a night was desperate. But I did it. George said the watch would check on her, her neighbours would make sure she was okay. I didn’t know if that worried me more.

  We came out of the hot, empty mouth of the underground at Westminster. The four remaining lines ran all through the night, but shuttled along devoid of people, mostly. It was an eerie silence, and one forced by police presence. Whatever journey you took, there was always a group of armed forces, patrolling, weapons lodged in their belts, ready. The trains used to stop running. It used to be a place of sanctuary, filled with people on the platforms who needed shelter, wedged all the way between the Eastbound Circle line and the Westbound Jubilee. But Mrs P put a stop to it, eventually. Said it was too dangerous, that they spread disease like rats.

  The fare was still expensive, but he paid for us both. I didn’t take it very regularly, and rubbed my hands on the old carpeted seats, and held my hand against the worn-down pole by the doors. When it came to our stop he rammed his shoulder against the door to get it open, and out we came into the dark tunnel, with only a few electric lights in the labyrinth that lay beyond and above us. We walked up the four flights of stairs to the top, past two security guards, laughing, one arm on a banister, the other on a baton. We came out into the darkness of Whitehall. Even Big Ben wasn’t illuminated. I’d never seen it at night, and always imagined it would be.

  He took me to his house, made of pale Georgian brick, on Old Queen Street. It was bright, and neat, and I imagined what it would be like to live here, right next to the park with its large expanse of empty pond. It was still green from spring, and the summer hadn’t wiped that out yet.

  He offered me a drink as we stepped inside, but my mouth still tasted the vile tang of champagne and so I refused. He had few possessions, I noted, and attributed this to a sense of minimalism and charm. But he wasn’t one to have his heart on his sleeve, or in his interiors. A man like him, who could gather together decorations for a house many of us could only dream of, decided to live an empty, solitary life. What truly decorated his life was on the inside, in the walls of his heart and his house, blocked away.

  I noticed he had a radio and I leapt towards it. ‘Does it work?’ I said, looking at the buttons and wanting to press them, wanting to test them and get the frequency right and hear the lightness of music.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and turned it on as though it was nothing. From that little box came a song as sweet as any I could remember. I leant against the counter, towards it, not knowing who was singing it or what the words were, but letting it block out any other noise from my mind. It was only when he put a hand on my back, softly, and laughed, that I realised where I was. I stood up and turned to him. He leant down and kissed me. ‘You like your music don’t you?’ It seemed to please him, and he turned the volume up. It soared. I felt a stinging in my eyes as I looked up to him. I thought his house was magic.

  ‘I have something to show you,’ he said.

  I thought it might be an excuse to take me upstairs, but he led me with such excitement, it betrayed a genuine interest. He took me to a room that was locked on the first floor. When he opened it, I saw it filled with rows of shelving, packed into the small space. The shelves were filled with dozens of jars of specimens. He picked them up and showed them to me.

  ‘Honeycomb,’ he said. ‘From every kind of bee you could imagine. Honey bee, bumblebee, carpenter bee, hairy footed flower bee, Andrena fulva,’ he laughed. ‘Here it all is. Some of it.’

  I stood in wonder at the pickled beings. A small horror came over me at these strange creatures: all legs; all antennae; all eyes and dead pupils and dead faces. But there was a lot of honeycomb. It was the most significant thing in the room.

  ‘I’ve studied the honeycomb endlessly,’ he said, looking at a jar of it, turning it about in his thick hand. ‘It’s fascinating. The structure of it. Its efficiency, the complexity of it. It’s something Le Corbusier himself couldn’t have thought of: a towering minimalist structure to house a thousand people, wonderfully productive. It’s inspiring. And you know the only way they’re capable of doing it? Because of the way they interact with each other on an individual level. They have no concept of the totality of the structure they’ve created. They just work by reacting to each other, with no central governance or system of organisation. They just do it because they’re all doing it. And in these random interactions of production they end up making something a thousand times more intelligently built than the individual bee could conceive of making.’ He looked at me, a coy expression on his face. ‘Albert Einstein once said “look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better”.’ He put the jar back down on the shelf, very carefully, aligning it with the others. ‘But I’ll tell you about our bee project another time. You must be tired,’ he said.

  He took me to his bedroom and offered me one of his dressing g
owns and a wash cloth. I used his bathroom; an expanse of marble with a sheen that I wanted to lick. I gazed at myself in the mirror for minutes, noting the shine to the surface, the corners that weren’t cracked. The cleanliness of it all.

  I would do as Jaminder said then, I had decided. I would be his, of my own choosing and decide afterwards what would come out of it. We would decide together. I would go to parties and maybe not drink, but I would eat, and I would listen to music, and one day I may even learn the piano, and play the keys as Jaminder had played them. I decided this, as I looked at my reflection, and decided I would need to ask Jaminder for a lipstick, and some powder. And maybe a comb for my hair, one that could pin it a certain way, and tame it. It was all possible, as I stood there. I would become.

  He knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Matilda,’ he said. He had decided too, but decided differently, I imagine. I did wonder why he had decided on me, as I was so different from all of them, even Jaminder. But maybe that was exactly why. I didn’t drag my heels through a tablecloth or rub lipstick on napkins. I was unspoiled; not like the ocean, or lakes or rivers or landscapes, unspoiled the way only a small person could be, not the sky or the earth or the moon. We’d touched even that.

  I opened the door, I went towards him. He led me to the bed and I perched on its side. He sat next to me, and put his hand in my hair, traced the shape of my ear with his thumb. He held my head like that for a while. ‘I went to Paris once, as a child,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ I said, I whispered it, luxuriously. ‘Tell me every street you walked down.’

  He liked this, these moments: feeding me with words and imaginings. He put on a silly faux accent and named the famous landmarks.

  I grimaced. ‘Not that. All the little places, the places that mattered.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Rue des Rosiers, the little restaurant on Impasse Berthaud with the thick velvet curtains and the olive oil potatoes.’

  He repeated the names back to me. ‘You miss those places the most?’

  ‘Yes, I miss the restaurants,’ I said, my head leaning into his hands, and up to him. ‘I miss the people. I miss my friend sitting across from me, our mothers letting us try a spoon of foie gras, joking about how one spoonful is enough to be lost forever. It’s my friend’s face I miss, and the look on it, when she tried something new for the first time.’

  ‘I could try and find foie gras,’ he said. He started to trace my mouth with his fingers, softly pushing on them, mesmerised by them.

  ‘You’d try and find anything, wouldn’t you.’

  He smiled, he held my head closer. ‘I would,’ he said. ‘I want to try it. I want to look that way. I want to be lost forever by a spoonful of something.’

  He kissed me, his hands about my neck. ‘I have something for you,’ he said, and his face said it would be something good.

  I sat patiently, like a child, waiting to be presented with it. ‘What is it?’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant, trying not to let the breath catch in my throat.

  He opened a drawer of his clothes chest, and tucked amongst his paired black socks was a fold of brown paper, a small slab of something, small enough to fit into his hand. He gave it to me and the paper was lovely and new, and crinkled at the edges in a satisfyingly crisp way. It was weighty and I felt what I wanted to feel, what I hoped it would be. A bar made up of squares.

  ‘Open it,’ he said, and I unfolded the paper which revealed another layer of thin worn out foil, but foil all the same. A thin silver slip of a thing I could remove, delicately.

  ‘Here’s the game,’ he said, ‘You can have one square for every one thing you tell me about your life. About your childhood, and the kind of person you are, and what you did before I was around and who you want to be. I want to know everything.’

  I laughed, and my hands shook, because it meant I hadn’t imagined it, but it was a bar of squares, and it was perfect. I held it up to my face, I smelt it, and I was back, next to the pain au chocolat and the soufflé, and the moelleux au chocolat and the milk bars and the fondant and the cocoa and the chunks of chocolate melting, coating the inside of my mouth.

  ‘Tell me one thing first,’ he said, pulling my hands down.

  He held them clasped in his, and I did it without thinking, such a small exchange, never thinking of guarding my internal life from him, of protecting myself. The thick chocolate mixed with the lump in my throat and made me giddy. I held onto the brown paper all the time, never wanting to let it go. I folded it up afterwards and kept it in my pocket, to keep the smell and the feeling of it for as long as I could.

  I laughed as I told him my sad little story, I laughed with glee and he laughed back. One square for Rue des Rosiers; one for my school. One square for our old grey cat, and the drizzle in London. One square for my brown pair of shoes, and one square for thread.

  One square for my mother, one square for my mother, one square for my mother.

  He pushed off my dressing gown, his hand underneath the material by my shoulder. He peeled it off to reveal my nakedness, but touched instead my face, and held it to his own. I felt caught in an in-between place, where maybe I hadn’t meant to stray, but where I’d wanted to. His hands were on me now, and I did want them on me, touching my waist, my breasts, between my legs. He was clothed, and remained so until my lips parted, and I asked him, ‘Please.’ Yes: I asked him. That first time, and other times. I asked him.

  He laid me on the bed and, just as Jaminder had told me, had precautions to take. He didn’t need asking, and he didn’t tell me. He smiled as he looked at my body, and it looked back at him. I thought of Jaminder’s words, why come here if not for all that, and I knew that he had come to the party for all that, alone. If he could have erased those hours with one bite, he would have, just to get to this moment. That was the difference between us.

  He was careful with me, he hesitated. But I pulled him in. I wanted to feel the force of him. It had been years, hadn’t it? I wanted to know. I thought of the clean marble and the mirror; the honey cake and the bees I hadn’t asked him about. It didn’t matter. I wanted to know only this. By doing this I would learn another life, where my body was not a burden, but a pleasure.

  He moved inside me and I welcomed it. Anything that was different and out of the ordinary was life. Life was not stitch after stitch, potatoes at dinner, black mould on the ceiling, and cycling through the village. Collecting coupons; trying not to read the newspaper; trying not to read what Mrs P had said next; trying not to be prodded and poked.

  I welcomed what I thought was its opposite: him, inside me. I didn’t realise that he was so close to that other life: of parliament and Mrs P, and the strange order of things. He found me in my village I was desperate to leave. But he took me to the heart of it all: to Westminster, where my whole body was dominated.

  He groaned and pulled out, at the end. I lay with my hands above my head, as he’d placed them. He kissed the inside of my elbow and I smiled over at him. I looked beyond him to the clean, bright windows in their white frames and imagined the park beyond the pale walls.

  ‘You’re so lucky to live in a place like this,’ I said.

  He snorted and sat up abruptly. ‘Lucky? Is that what people say nowadays?’ He looked down at me, arms crossed over his stomach. ‘My family once had an apartment in Kensington Palace. I spent my childhood running around rooftop gardens, and we lost everything. Because of what, essentially? The weather?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’ I wasn’t sure what I was apologising for.

  He gestured around the room. ‘This tiny thing was compensation for all that. But nothing can compensate for what happened.’

  ‘Better off than most, still,’ I said, quietly. He pretended not to hear me. ‘Do you understand it? Does everything that happened make sense to you?’

  He smiled at me, and kissed my arm again. ‘Young people can’t understand it. Can’t conceive of it. People don’t believe that things h
appened gradually. That one thing slowly affects another. People only want to believe in the catalyst, the tipping point. People only thought it was real after the blackout. They didn’t want to see that it was a million tiny things, for years, that brought us to a big mush.’ He slapped his hands together to indicate what he meant, and I flinched. ‘But Auntie saw it,’ he said. ‘She saw a way out. Still does.’ He looked at me expectantly, his face flushed and smooth like an apple.

  I nodded, ‘You’re right, I know.’

  ‘What we don’t know, though, is why it is so inhuman to see beyond the small, and the immediate. No one wants to see the big picture. There’s no hope in that.’

  I stroked his arm, my fingers passing over the soft hairs. I looked up at him. I hoped he would reach his arm over me so that I could thread through it. ‘Do you believe in hope? Is that why you became an MP?’

  He exhaled with a laugh. ‘I knew it would be the best place to be. I wasn’t about to let everything go, I still wanted a life. It made the most sense after the blackout. To be in the thick of it. Auntie made sure there was enough food for everyone, and that everyone got that hour of electricity that they wanted. But I was part of making sure that really happened.’

  I wondered what he’d seen that I hadn’t; what he knew that I didn’t. But it worked both ways. He could never conceive of my own life being ripped apart, and how that destruction wasn’t the same for all people.

  ‘There’s just us. That’s we want to think, isn’t it? There’s only us.’ He kissed me, lingering, and moved his arm away, before getting up to go to the bathroom.

  I looked at the ceiling above me. I looked at the electric light, hanging from the socket. It was dark outside. He’d taken a candle up the stairs with us, saying he’d used his electricity already today. It flickered in the corner. I stood up, went to the light switch by the door. I tried it.

  Everything illuminated.