I'm on the train! (20 page)

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Can’t I kiss you, for God’s sake?’

‘Later, Mike, OK?’

He pulled out a chair and plonked himself down. ‘Christ! I could murder for a drink!’

She frowned in disapproval. Eunice had taught her not to say ‘Christ’ or ‘God’, unless she was actually talking about the Deity. Using such words in ordinary conversation was called ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’, and was blasphemous, apparently. Even ‘bloody’ was wrong, so Eunice said, because it literally meant ‘By Our Lady’ and thus was just as disrespectful.

Mike snapped his fingers at the waiter and, again, she was tempted to protest. The staff were rushed off their feet. Couldn’t he show a bit of patience; copy Michael’s graciousness and
forbearance
? Besides, he hadn’t even asked her how she was, but was still complaining about his ‘fucking awful journey’.

‘Mike,’ she said, more sharply than she intended, ‘let’s change the subject, shall we? You’re here now and that’s the important thing.’

‘OK, keep your hair on. I need a drink, that’s all.’

‘Fine. Shall we have that wine we had before?’ She knew nothing about wine, so she couldn’t remember its name, but what she did remember was how gloriously fizzy and bubbly it had been – a true celebration drink.

‘Which one do you mean?’

‘You know – the one we had on our first date. The waiter brought it in an ice-bucket and—’

‘No way!’ he interrupted. ‘That was a sparkling white and it won’t go well with steak.’

‘Who said we were eating steak?’

‘
I
did. I fancy a nice, thick sirloin.’

She stole a glance at Michael, needing guidance in this matter – and immediately received it.

‘You can let the small things go, Carole, so long as you don’t compromise on more important matters.’

‘OK,’ she smiled, ‘red’s fine, Mike. But, before we order anything, I think we need to talk. It’s ages since we’ve seen each other and, on that last occasion, you behaved extremely badly.’

He had the grace to look shame-faced; even reached across to grip her hand. ‘Yeah, as I’ve said already, darling, I feel gutted about that. I lost my rag – I admit it. But can’t we – you know – start again? I’ve missed you terribly – missed our shags
especially
.’

Did he have to use words like ‘shags’, which must seem
dreadfully
vulgar to an angel? Besides, she hated the thought that it was just the sex he had missed.

His hand strayed down her thigh; moved lower, to her crotch. ‘In fact, why don’t we skip dinner and go back to the flat right now? I’m
dying
for you, Carole, so let’s not waste precious time.’

‘No,’ she said, firmly pushing off his hand. ‘We need to discuss things first.’

‘What things?’

‘Our whole relationship – is it going to work or not?’

‘’Course it is. Don’t be stupid! We’ve always hit it off in bed. You’re the best lay I’ve ever had.’

‘I’m
not
stupid, and I’m
not
a lay. And, in any case, sex isn’t the only thing that counts.’ How had she ever found the courage to take so bold a line? That question didn’t need an answer – not with Michael standing by.

‘Oh, come on, darling, you know what I mean. Don’t be difficult.’

‘You keep accusing me of being this or that, when all I want is to get a few things straight.’

He raked an impatient hand through his hair. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you. You never used to be so bossy.’

‘It’s not a matter of being bossy. What I’ve come to realize—’ She broke off as she saw a waiter making for their table.

‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’

‘Yeah. A beer – a large one.’

‘Mike, I thought we were drinking wine.’

‘
You
can, if you want.’ He gestured to her glass. ‘Fancy another of those?’

Again, she looked to Michael for advice.

‘As I said,’ her angel whispered, ‘let the small things go. If a man prefers beer to wine, that’s hardly cause for a quarrel.’

‘Thanks,’ she murmured, gratefully, then thanked Mike, as well, telling him that, yes, she’d love a top-up.

‘And let’s order, shall we? I’m famished. Hold on!’ he yelled at the waiter’s departing back. ‘I’ll have a sirloin steak – medium-rare, with chips.’

‘And what for the
signorina
?’

Shouldn’t he have asked the ‘
signorina
’ what she wanted, before putting in his own order? And said ‘please’ to the waiter, rather than sounded so high-handed? ‘I haven’t looked at the menu yet,’ she pointed out, tight-lipped.

‘Well, buck up! I’m ravenous.’

‘I thought this was meant to be a nice, romantic dinner. Do we have to rush?’

‘Stop jumping down my throat, will you? Frankly, it’s beginning to piss me off.’

‘I’ll come back in a few minutes,’ the waiter said, making a tactful getaway as Mike’s voice rose in irritation.

Once he was out of earshot, she said with deliberate calmness, imitating Michael’s tranquil tones, ‘Well, if you’re so pissed off, as you call it, why don’t we ditch dinner altogether?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Carole,
you’re
the one who wanted to go out. I said all along it would be best to meet in the flat.’

‘Best for you, maybe, but not for me.’

‘And what’s
that
supposed to mean?’

‘Well, to be honest, I’m not sure I want you in the flat.’

‘Bloody cheek! It’s
my
pad, more or less.’

‘In actual fact, we share it.’

‘In which case, I’m perfectly entitled to return to my own place.’

‘Fair enough. But I’m not coming with you.’

Kicking back his chair, he slammed his fist on the table. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘If you listened for a moment, you might find out.’

He sprang to his feet, all but knocking into Michael. ‘You’ve met someone else, I bet! That’s the reason for all this shit! I don’t see you for two fucking weeks and you sneak off behind my back and shack up with some other bloke!’

She was in desperate need of Michael, to help her keep control. And, as always, he was there for her; his soft, melodious voice reminding her that any sort of altercation would demean her and gain nothing and that, whatever happened, she must refrain from shouting abuse. Yet her silence seemed to rile Mike even more; clearly increasing his suspicions.

‘So I’m right! You can’t deny it. You’ve been lying all this time, you two-faced cow! You soft-talk me into coming here; persuade me to wine and dine you on completely false pretences, because all you plan to do is give me the push.’

It would be so easy to retaliate; call him names, in turn; tell him he was wrong – had always been wrong, in fact. But recrimination was pointless and undignified. Instead, she kept her gaze on Michael; breathing in his majesty and power. Only in an archangel would such sublime authority be combined with such true
gentleness
and grace. How refined he seemed; how distinguished; how effortlessly superior to all mere mortal men.

‘Go on – admit it!’ Mike was standing over her, fists clenched; his whole stance threatening. But beyond him there was Michael – Michael with his peaceable expression, his shimmering gold halo and luminous white wings; Michael in all his supernatural
splendour
.

‘Yes,’ she said, shifting her gaze reluctantly to Mike’s flushed and furious face. ‘There
is
someone else in my life – someone truly awesome who’ll be with me for ever.’

‘S
upper’s ready, Ian!’ she called.

No answer.

Well, what did she expect – with Tiger Woods playing in the Masters? She should have planned the meal for earlier, but then, whatever time she served it, her husband would have been too absorbed to eat. The entire evening, he’d been cemented to the sofa; first watching some interminable documentary, about baboons in Tanzania, and now, of course, the golf. She should really have dispensed with the formalities – years ago, as so many people had – and resorted to simply eating on their laps. But sirloin-steak-
and-snooker
, ravioli-and-rugby, fried-fish-and-football, didn’t exactly appeal. In any case, she liked sitting at a table, properly laid up, as she had done throughout her childhood. Her mother had insisted on maintaining decent standards; deploring those undisciplined women who allowed their families to eat in different rooms, at different times, or even graze on the hoof.

Did she
have
to be so rigid, though, this evening? She and her mother were completely different people, after all. In fact, she had rebelled against her, fiercely, from the start, and been forced to knuckle under only by a bitter twist of fate. Best to put Ian’s meal on a tray, for once, and take it in to him, rather than keep it warm in the oven, where the vegetables would spoil and the meat soon shrivel up.

‘Thanks,’ he murmured, once she had placed the tray on his lap. His eyes, however, never wavered from the screen.

She lingered by the sofa. ‘Who’s in the lead?’ she asked. Having
been alone all day, while – needless to say – he was playing golf, she was as hungry as much for company as food.

‘Sssh! Angel Cabrera’s just taking a putt for a birdie.’

‘Sorry I spoke.’ She flounced back to the dining-table, where a glaze of grease had formed on her lamb chops. She cut into them with venom, as if attacking Ian. It was
his
fault they’d never had children – for her a cause of deep distress. Admittedly, it was hardly fair to blame a man for defective sperm but, if he had only agreed to adopt, or even foster, she might be surrounded now by a brood of four or five.

‘More peas, Suzanne?’

‘Good boy, Edward! You’ve finished all your carrots.’

‘James, don’t kick your brother, dear.’

Despite the fact she was talking out loud and had left the door ajar, Ian wouldn’t hear a word. For him, no one else existed except Tiger Woods, Angel Cabrera, Shingo Katayama and the rest. What bizarre names they seemed to have.

‘Angel, it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.’

‘Tiger, I’ve told you before, we don’t shovel in our food like that.’

‘Elbows off the table, Shingo!’

Extraordinary how her mother’s strictures remained jangling in her head, even ten years after her death; those maternal
admonitions
lodged in her mind as permanently as an inscription engraved in stone. But then, as an only child, the attention of both her parents’ had been focused on her exclusively: her deportment, manners, attitude, appearance, all matters of the gravest concern. If they didn’t curb, control and constrain her, she might end up ‘going to the bad’ – one of her mother’s favourite phrases.

Spearing a carrot onto her fork, she snapped its head off, viciously. She had been born a free, wild creature and they had turned her into a lap-dog. They had even chosen her husband, more or less; picked a nice, domesticated Labrador, whom, they felt, would guard her, and the house, and not harbour treacherous
longings
to run wild with the pack. Left to her own devices, she might simply have eloped, and selected a cheetah as mate, someone fast and fierce and dangerous.

Still chewing her carrot, she mooched into the sitting-room again. ‘Good match?’ she asked, noticing his untouched meal. He had offloaded the tray to the coffee-table, as if food were a complete irrelevance, in face of this life-and-death event. Sitting bolt upright, with fists clenched and furrowed brow, he might have been watching the fall of the Twin Towers, rather than a mere two-foot putt.

‘Christ, yes! It’s incredibly dramatic. Phil Mickelson’s just lost his ball in Rae’s Creek!’

Three sentences. She should be deeply grateful for such bounty, although it was clear she wasn’t wanted. Wives, comments,
conversation
, were invariably distractions when any kind of sport was in progress.

Drifting back to the table, she found herself counting peas, as if needing some sort of mantra to calm her jumpy state. Eight, nine, ten, twelve…. A million-and-twelve, if she totted up all the peas she had ever cooked for Ian. And why not add the Brussels sprouts and broccoli florets, the carrots, leeks and runner beans – all the things she bought to keep him healthy. Yet
she
was the one with the illness – the cause of her sell-out, in fact; that compromise she’d been forced to make with life, adventure, love – and at the age of just nineteen. A red-blooded cheetah would hardly want a mate with diabetes. While
he
was out on the prowl, she’d be tied down to her insulin injections; fussing about her blood-sugar levels; swallowing a whole cache of drugs to prevent those complications threatened by the specialist: kidney failure, eye-disease, heart attack and stroke. But, of course, her mother had been crucial then, as nurse, adviser, comforter. Indeed, she had clung to her, in gratitude; willing to lose her ‘self’ in the process, simply as the price she had to pay.

All at once, she snatched up her plate, strode into the kitchen and tipped the contents into the bin. She was sick of eating healthily; sick of drugs, injections and the strict, restrictive diet. All the pies and puddings she made for Ian were, for her, forbidden fruits.

‘Are you ready for your apple pie?’ she asked, venturing in to see him again. Pointless question, when he hadn’t eaten so much as a mouthful of his main course. Nonetheless, he gave a distracted nod.

She dolloped almost half the pie onto the biggest plate she could find and put it on the coffee-table, next to the congealing chops. The pie, too, would soon go cold, and a clammy skin would have formed across the custard, by the time he got round to eating it – at midnight, more than likely.

Wouldn’t it be better to go out somewhere and leave him to his golf? True, it was blowing a gale – last week’s blustery showers having given way to more tempestuous weather – but at least that would be in keeping with her mood. On-screen, all was calm; the Augusta sky serenely blue and cloudless, with not a breath of wind. And, of course, it was daylight there, not dark.

Back in the kitchen, she ate a tiny piece of pie, guiltily and standing up, then slurped some custard from the jug, envisaging her mother’s face – aghast with horror and distaste at so sluttish a departure from the rules. Neither pie nor custard satisfied. She craved more – and yet still more.

Wandering over to the window, she peered out at the windswept garden: the branches of the apple trees bending and protesting in the murky, curdled darkness, and the gypsophila quivering, as if it had an ague. She tried to imagine being the wind – untrammelled, unconfined; free to rage and roar, blast, explore, instead of cowering safe indoors. Sundays were always tedious; days
sacrosanct
to hearth and home, when most of her friends were involved with their children, or entertaining relatives. Sadly, she didn’t have those options – with both her parents dead, no siblings and no offspring, and her only aunt miles away in Wales.

Annoyed by her own restlessness, she debated whether to watch the match with Ian. So long as she kept silent and didn’t interrupt the game, her presence would be tolerated.

‘Bloody golf!’ she said, aloud.

Not that she was anti-sport in general. A rugger scrum never failed to excite her: all those muddy, muscly bodies grappling with each other, high on testosterone. Boxing, too, had a definite appeal; the deft footwork, lunging blows, the genuine risk of injury. But golf was so well-mannered in comparison; lacking pace, attack and risk, and determinedly middle-class – as she and Ian were, of course.
Class had mattered profoundly to her parents, who’d built their lives around tennis parties, bridge evenings and membership of the Rotary Club and, when at home, were slaves to the whole rigmarole of tea-strainers and butter-knives, immaculately ironed tablecloths, even sugar-tongs, for God’s sake. She suddenly pictured her
fastidious
mother handling her father’s penis with a pair of sugar-tongs – if he
had
a penis, that is. Such a lustful appendage seemed totally inappropriate for a timid civil servant who had emerged from the womb already clad in pinstripes and carrying a briefcase.

All at once, a blood-curdling shriek pierced the silence of the kitchen. Alarmed, she rushed in to Ian. Had he suffered some sort of seizure, precipitated by the tension of the game?

No. He was still alive, still upright. ‘What on earth’s the matter, darling?’ she enquired, forced to raise her voice above the din
on-screen
: roars of approval, rapturous applause.

‘Sssh! Don’t speak. Cabrera’s just chipped in from a hundred yards!’

Although relieved he was unharmed, that shriek was still resounding in her head – a shriek of such intensity and passion, she wondered if she’d imagined it. In all his years of watching sport, her undemonstrative husband had mustered little more than an
appreciative
smile or sigh, however huge the triumph or appalling the disaster. Yet the noise had been so deafening, it must have reached to Augusta itself. She was all the more surprised, because chipping in from a hundred yards wasn’t
that
astounding – almost as rare as a hole-
in-one
, maybe, but hardly a cause for hysteria. As she stared at him, incredulous, a second yell issued from his throat; even louder and more dramatic than the first; the very walls seeming to reel in shock.

Abruptly, she left the room and slumped down at the dining table, still neatly laid for two.
How
, she thought, with rising
indignation
, could Cabrera prompt so blatant a reaction, when she herself could not? Ian was a silent lover. Even at the point of climax, not a sound escaped him. Good manners again, no doubt. Noise would disturb the neighbours; might even make him look debauched. Such a lack of self-control was excessive and over-
the-top
, and certainly wouldn’t go down well in the Rotary Club.

Suddenly, she was back with Stefano, her unruly Sicilian lover; flushed and naked in his rumpled bed. He was letting out a torrent of Italian – expletives, curses, love-talk, all jumbled and mixed up. Although she couldn’t grasp the words, her body understood – and more so, when he switched to gasps and moans. She, too, was yelping and growling – above him, underneath him; out of her own skin and inhabiting some new, wild world where Stefano was both beast and god. She was high – on
him
– all the colours brighter; every part of her opening in response: her mouth, her body, her infinitely voracious cunt. All boundaries were disappearing, between beast and human, him and her. There was only
now
; this extreme, excessive moment; everything tumbling and tumultuous and brutally ecstatic.

As she came, she bit his shoulder – a ferocious love-bite, drawing blood, since she was solely flesh and blood now. That was only fitting. She had left her spoilsport intellect behind; her whole rationed and restricted side engulfed.

Impetuously, she sprang up from the table, raced upstairs and stripped off all her clothes. Then, rifling through her wardrobe, she grabbed a black-lace négligé she hadn’t worn in years – see-through lace, with side-slits. Her feet barely touched the stair-carpet as, now clad in the diaphanous lace, she darted down again.

‘Fuck me!’ she demanded, charging in to Ian.

He stared at her, as if she had gone insane. ‘What in God’s name are you up to, Fay?’

Stefano had never called her Fay; always
Fiammetta
: ‘little flame’. With him, she
was
a flame; on fire for him; ablaze with every sensation he aroused. ‘Fuck me,’ she repeated.

‘Don’t use that word! You know I find it gross.’

‘Screw me, then; make love to me – call it what you like.’

‘Fay, what the hell’s got into you? I’ve never known you in such a crazy mood. But I’m afraid you’ve got your timing badly wrong. This is the most riveting match I’ve seen in twenty years, so if you imagine I’d miss the end of it, to gratify some whim of yours, then you’re very much mistaken.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

Quietly, she left the room; closed the door carefully,
considerately
.
Why shouldn’t he enjoy his game? She knew the rules – not just of golf; of marriage. That wild Sicilian interlude had been an aberration, before the outrage of her mother summoned her back to duty and decorum; to butter-knives, net curtains, sterility,
suppression
. She could hardly blame her mother, though. The diabetes diagnosis had been the deciding factor; casting a dark shadow on her life – making it a
half
-life, as it doused all spontaneity, all sense of being free to seize the day. Fine for her contemporaries to be heedless and happy-go-lucky, but
she
was required to maintain a constant vigilance. Monitoring became a daily ritual, and
everywhere
she went she had to lug her test-kits, needles, glucose – unwanted and resented baggage. Once, love had kept her alive; now it was insulin. Of course, those short six months with Stefano had seemed all the more precious in comparison; a kind of brief eternity, when – despite her restrictive parents – romance, adventure, passion, had all been possible, all real.

Suddenly, on impulse, she hitched up her lace négligé, threw her thickest coat on top, fetched her shoes, and keys, and stampeded out of the house. To hell with syringes and test-kits! However reckless it might be to venture out without them, she didn’t give a toss. Who cared about dangers to her health? All that mattered at this moment was to be living at full flame again, if only for a day, a night.