Read Eighty Days Yellow Online
Authors: Vina Jackson
Tags: #Romance, #Erotica, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Eighty Days Yellow
Contents
4. A Man and His String Quartet
I blame it on Vivaldi.
More specifically, on my CD of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
, which now sat face down on the bedside cabinet, alongside the body of my softly snoring boyfriend.
We’d had a fight when Darren had arrived home at 3 a.m. following a business trip and found me lying on the wooden floor in his living room, nude, the concerto playing as loudly as his surround-sound system would allow. Loud.
The
presto
movement of ‘Summer’, the Concerto No. 2 in G minor, was just about to kick into full swing when Darren flung open the door.
I hadn’t noticed that he’d returned until I felt the flat of his shoe resting on my right shoulder and shaking me back and forth. I opened my eyes and saw him leaning over me. I then noticed that he’d turned the lights on and the CD had come to a sudden halt.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said.
‘Listening to music,’ I replied in my smallest voice.
‘I can hear that! I could hear it all the way down the street!’ he yelled.
He’d been away in Los Angeles, and looked remarkably fresh for someone who had just got off a long flight. He was still wearing half of his business suit, a crisp white shirt, leather belt and dark-navy trousers with a very thin pinstripe, the matching jacket slung over one arm. He was gripping the handle of his wheelie case tightly. It had evidently been raining outside, though I hadn’t heard a thing over the sound of the music. His case was slick with rain, rivulets running down the side and pooling onto the floor alongside my thigh. The bottoms of his trousers were wet where his umbrella had not been able to shield him, and were stuck to his calves.
I turned my head towards his shoe and saw an inch of damp calf. He smelled musky, part sweat, part rain, part shoe polish and leather. A few drips of moisture fell from his shoe and onto my arm.
Vivaldi always had a very particular effect on me, and neither the early morning hour nor the look of irritation on Darren’s face did anything to distract me from the feeling of warmth that spread rapidly through my body, lighting the blood in my veins in much the same way that the music had.
I turned so that his shoe was still pressed lightly to my right arm and I ran my left hand up his trouser leg.
He stepped backwards, immediately, as if I’d burned him, and shook his head.
‘Jesus Christ, Summer . . .’
He wheeled the case up against the wall next to the CD rack, removed
The Four Seasons
from the player and then walked to his room. I considered getting up and following him, but decided against it. There was no way that I could win an argument with Darren when I didn’t have any clothes on. I hoped that if I just continued to lie still, I could defuse his rage by appearing less visible, hopeful that my unclothed body would blend better into his wooden flooring if I was lying horizontally rather than standing upright.
I heard the sound of the wardrobe door open and the familiar rattling of wooden coat hangers as he hung up his jacket. In the six months that we had been dating, I hadn’t once seen him throw his coat over a chair or the back of the couch, like a normal person would. He hung his jacket straight into the wardrobe, then sat down to take off his shoes, then removed his cufflinks, then unbuttoned his shirt and put it straight into the washing basket, then took off his belt and hung it over the wardrobe rail alongside half a dozen others in varying sombre shades of navy, black and brown. He wore designer briefs, the style I like best on men, tiny pairs of stretch-cotton shorts with a thick waistband. I loved the way that the briefs hugged him, tantalisingly tight, although to my eternal disappointment he would always cover himself with a robe and never walked through the flat with just his underwear on. Nakedness offended Darren.
We’d met at a recital in the summer. It was a big deal for me; one of the scheduled violinists had called in sick and I had been drafted in at the last minute to play in the orchestra, a piece by Arvo Pärt, which I hated. I found it jerky and monotonous, but for a classical slot on a real stage, albeit a small stage, I would have played Justin Bieber and found a way to look as though I was enjoying myself. Darren had been in the audience and he’d loved it. He had a thing for redheads, and he said later that he couldn’t see my face because of the angle of the stage, but he had a great view of the top of my head. He said my hair had shone in the stage light as though I was on fire. He’d bought a bucket of champagne and had used his connections with the concert organisers to find me backstage.
I don’t like champagne, but I drank it anyway, because he was tall and attractive and the closest thing I’d ever had to a bona fide groupie.
I asked him what he’d have done if I’d been missing my front teeth or had been, in some other way, not to his taste, and he replied that he’d have tried his luck with the percussionist, who wasn’t a redhead but was still fairly attractive.
A few hours later, I was drunk and flat on my back in his room in Ealing, wondering how I ended up in bed with a man who stopped to hang up his jacket and lay his shoes carefully together before he climbed on top of me. However, he had a big cock and a nice apartment, and although it turned out that he hated all the music I loved, we spent most of our weekends over the following months together. Unfortunately, to my mind, not nearly enough of that time was spent in bed, and far too much of it was spent going to see highbrow art affairs that I didn’t enjoy and was convinced Darren didn’t understand.
Men who saw me play in proper classical music venues instead of pubs and tube stations seemed to make the same mistake that Darren had, believing that I would possess all of the traits they associated with a female classical violinist. I would be well mannered, proper, cultured, educated, ladylike and graceful, in possession of a wardrobe full of simple and stylish gowns for wearing on stage, none of them vulgar or showing too much flesh. I would wear kitten heels and be unaware of the effect that my slim ankles might arouse.
In fact, I had only one long, formal black dress for concerts, which I’d bought for a tenner from a shop in Brick Lane and had altered by a tailor. It was velvet with a high neck and a low back, but had been at the dry cleaner’s the night I met Darren, so I had bought a bandage dress from Selfridges on my credit card and tucked the tags into my underwear. Fortunately, Darren was a tidy lover and had left no stains either on me or the dress, so I was able to return it the next day.
I had my own place, where I spent my weeknights, part of a block of flats in Whitechapel. It was a bedsit, more of a room than an apartment, with a moderately large single bed, a standing rail that functioned as a wardrobe and a small sink, fridge and cooker. The bathroom was down the hall, shared with four others, whom I did bump into occasionally, but generally they kept to themselves.
Despite the location and the run-down building, I could never have afforded the rent had I not struck a deal with the leaseholder, whom I met in a bar one night after a late-night visit to the British Museum. He never fully explained why he wanted to rent the room out for less than he was paying for it, but I presumed that beneath the floorboards lay either a body or a cache of white powder and I often lay awake at night expecting to hear the stampeding footsteps of a SWAT team running up the hall.
Darren had never been to my flat, partly because I had a feeling that he couldn’t have brought himself to set foot on the premises without having the whole building steam-cleaned, and partly because I liked to have a portion of my life that belonged entirely to me. I suppose deep down I knew that our relationship was unlikely to last, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a jilted lover throwing rocks at my window in the night.
He had suggested, more than once, that I move in with him and save the money that I was spending on rent so that I could put it towards a nicer violin, or more lessons, but I refused. I hate living with other people, particularly lovers, and I’d rather make money moonlighting on a street corner than be supported by a boyfriend.
I heard the soft snap of his cufflink box closing, shut my eyes and squeezed my legs together in an attempt to make myself invisible.
He stepped back into the living room and walked straight past me into the kitchen. I heard the rush of the kitchen tap, the soft hiss of the gas lighting and, a few minutes later, the rumble of the kettle. He had one of those modern but old-fashioned-style kettles that needs to be heated on the stove until it whistles. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just get an electric one, but he claimed that the water tasted better, and that a proper cup of tea should be made with a proper pot of water. I don’t drink tea. Even the smell of it makes me ill. I drink coffee, but Darren refused to make me coffee after 7 p.m. as it kept me awake, and he said that my restless nocturnal fidgeting kept him awake too.
I relaxed into the floor and pretended that I was somewhere else, slowing my breathing in a concentrated effort to stay perfectly still, like a corpse.
‘I just can’t speak to you when you’re like this, Summer.’ His voice floated from the kitchen, disembodied. It was one of my favourite things about him, the rich tone of his public-schoolboy accent, at turns soft and warm, and at other times cold and hard. I felt a rush of warmth between my thighs and locked my legs together as tightly as I could, thinking of how Darren had laid a towel down the one and only time we’d had sex on the living-room floor. He hated mess.
‘Like what?’ I replied, without opening my eyes.
‘Like this! Naked and stretched out on the floor like a lunatic! Get up and put some fucking clothes on.’
He drained the last mouthfuls of his tea, and hearing the sound of his gentle gulps, I imagined how it would feel to have him kneel with his mouth between my legs. The thought made me flush.
Darren didn’t normally go down on me unless I wasn’t more than five minutes out of the shower, and even then his licks were tentative, and his tongue replaced by his finger at the earliest possible polite opportunity. He preferred to use only one finger and had not responded well when I had reached my hand down and tried to guide two more inside me.
‘Jesus, Summer,’ he’d said, ‘you’ll be gaping by the time you’re thirty if you carry on like that.’
He’d gone into the kitchen and washed his hands with dishwashing liquid before coming back to bed and rolling over, falling asleep with his back to me while I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. From the vigorous sounds of splashing, it seemed that he’d washed all the way up to his elbows, like a veterinary nurse about to birth a calf, or a priest about to make a sacrifice.
