Playing Grace (23 page)

‘Dear boy,’ Gilbert said. ‘I’ve told him before that they’ll beat him every time, but he’s a tryer.’ Grace turned to see Gilbert raising his glass of wine in Tate’s direction in a kind of salute, leaving her to pick over the three pieces of information she had gleaned from that statement:

1. Gilbert had brought Tate to Acar’s before.

2. Tate had already bonded with men who, despite her years of coming to Acar’s, had only ever regarded her as if she were a unicorn.

3. Tate was persistent.

Well, she’d actually known that last fact already.

‘I didn’t expect to see Tate,’ she said nonchalantly, over the sound of a lot of bonding from the backgammon table. ‘You didn’t mention it on the phone.’

‘No, that’s because Tate said you probably wouldn’t come if you knew he was going to be here. Ah …’ Gilbert was looking over her shoulder, which alerted her to the fact that Tate must be on the move. She steeled herself against his arrival.

How had things changed so drastically and so quickly? This used to be her and Gilbert’s place. Six days, that’s all it had been since they were last here discussing Violet.
Well, that was Pre-Tate. Never mind, never mind, soon it would be Post-Tate.

She simply had to survive Present-Tate.

When Tate came back to their table she gave him a smile designed to suggest that she had no lingering memory of him holding her hand.

He got the message; she saw him getting the message and she saw him swallow it down as he reached for his bottle of lager and took a sip from it.

‘Leave reception tidy enough for you?’ he said with a sideways shift of his eyes.

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Bet you thought I’d stuffed it all down the back of the sofa?’

She thought of the way she had checked to see if he’d done that. ‘No, of course not. But you did it all very quietly, never heard a thing.’

He was staring at the label on the lager bottle. ‘Nope, wanted it to be a nice surprise for you. Bit like turning up here and finding me, eh?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Lovely.’

‘I’m sure. So, gonna have something to drink?’ Tate was looking around, she presumed for Hakan. ‘I’m guessing it’ll be a lemonade or Coke or something?’ He was fitting another piece to her jigsaw.

‘Paragon of virtue is our Grace,’ Gilbert replied, and although he said it with a grin in her direction, it felt like another betrayal on top of the one she felt he’d committed by inviting Tate along.

A worse thought hit her: Gilbert had invited Tate first. What if inviting her had simply been an afterthought?

‘You know that really friendly, tall attendant at the National?’ she said. ‘The one with the lovely lilting accent.’

‘Samuel?’ Gilbert frowned.

‘Well, have you ever talked to him? He seems—’

She stopped as Hakan came to the table bearing a bowl of olives balanced on an ashtray. ‘So, Tate my man,’ he said, ‘you know Chicago, yeah? ’Cos Mum’s been giving Dad all that …’ Hakan made an opening and closing duck’s bill with his free hand. ‘Wants to go out there for a holiday, yeah? You talk to him about it sometime?’ Hakan put the olives and the ashtray on the table. ‘Hey, Grace, what’ll it be?’

‘Just a lemonade, please.’

‘Nothing to eat?’

‘No thanks, Hakan.’ She felt stupidly self-conscious about eating in front of Tate, as if it were too intimate.

‘I’ll have another lager,’ Tate said, putting the empty bottle on Hakan’s tray. ‘And Gilb, another wine?’

Gilbert shook his head vehemently before screwing up his eyes and saying, ‘Well, just a small one, Hakan.’

‘So, Gilbert, about Samuel,’ Grace began again, ‘have you had the chance to talk to him at all recently?’

‘No, other than the odd “hello” and “goodbye”. Smiles a lot, doesn’t he?’

There was something so dismissive about Gilbert’s verdict that Grace felt rebuffed too and she sat back and pulled her coat around herself. It was an action she saw Tate had registered and she wondered what meaning he had assigned to it. He was explaining something about Chicago to Gilbert, but she sensed his attention was on her. She concentrated on the noise of London in the background. The Christmas decorations were going up out on the main road, the nights were drawing in … it would be a hop, skip and a jump before Christmas was upon them. She could smell it.

He’ll be gone not long after that
, she comforted herself.

Hakan delivered the drinks and she sipped at her lemonade and eyed the remaining food on Gilbert’s plate with envy. She should order something, but she imagined Tate watching her mouth and felt vulnerable. Oh God, he was watching her mouth now and she had to force herself not to put down her lemonade.

‘I was thinking of growing a goatee,’ she suddenly heard Gilbert say. He was tilting his chin this way and that. ‘What do you think?’

Where had this idea come from? The tour yesterday?
Another disturbing new development to chalk up to Tate.

‘Go for it, Gilb,’ Tate said, ‘you only live once. It’ll suit you. Make you look … louche.’

‘Louche?’ Gilbert seemed pleased and took out his pack of cigars and proffered it to Tate.

‘Stick to cigarettes, thanks.’ Tate got out a packet, put a cigarette to his lips and leaned forward over the flame Gilbert was holding out to light it. Grace watched the tip of the cigarette glow orange and Tate pulled back from the flame and turned his head to look at her.

‘I think I ought to be getting back,’ she said, making to stand up, but Gilbert wouldn’t hear of it.

‘No, no, Grace,’ he said, laying his hand over hers. ‘You’ve barely had half an hour. Anyway, I’ve been most rude. I haven’t asked you how your father is. Still with you?’

She sat back in her seat again, feeling more and more unsettled by Tate’s presence. The way he was looking at her. Smoking and looking.

‘Afraid so,’ she said. ‘I was hoping he’d be gone before … before the weekend.’

‘You mean before Mark arrives?’ Gilbert corrected her happily.

‘Mark?’ Tate asked.

‘Grace’s boyfriend. Works away. Seismologist for an oil company. Works all over, doesn’t he, Grace?

She nodded, wishing Gilbert would be quiet now. She just knew Tate was building up to say something smart and she didn’t want him trying to burrow into that part of her life.

She saw him take a drag on his cigarette, tilt his head right back and exhale a thin, rapid plume of smoke. ‘Been going out long?’

‘About a year.’

‘Well, it’s a calendar year,’ Gilbert said as if thinking it through, ‘but if you added up the
actual
time you spent together, it would probably only be a few months, wouldn’t it?’

‘How long’s he back for now?’ Tate asked, looking at the end of his cigarette as if it were fascinating.

‘Just until Sunday afternoon in London. Then he’s seeing some friends in Birmingham. I might catch up with him again for a couple of hours before he heads out of London later in the week. Maybe not.’

‘Well, don’t get too excited there, Gracie.’

There it was: the something smart. She didn’t respond and concentrated on imagining what the Christmas decorations in Oxford Street would look like this year.

‘Leave Grace alone,’ Gilbert was saying. ‘She is
quite
happy with a long-distance relationship. Before Mark there was David and he worked for a charity out in Botswana.’

Grace wondered if it would look strange to take her scarf off and gag Gilbert with it.

‘Ah, pattern emerging.’ Tate was nodding in a worrying way that suggested he had made another piece of the Grace puzzle fit. He took one last draw on his cigarette before stubbing it out in the ashtray.

Grace thought about the leaves falling in Green Park – would there be enough for a bonfire? Could she already smell bonfire smoke?
No. Don’t think about bonfires. See, that’s what Tate did: got you so riled you started thinking …

‘Pattern?’ she snapped.

‘Yeah, you know, not wanting to get too serious, keeping ’em at arm’s length.’

‘Why can’t the pattern be that I like men who go off and do their own thing, but come back to me whenever possible?’

‘What? When they can fit you in around visiting their friends?’

Grace wished he’d choke on that laugh of his and felt the indignation rise in her chest, before it spread outwards so rapidly that she had to take her hand off her lemonade glass for fear she would pick it up and chuck its contents over him. It was only because she knew it would be further evidence that he had got to her that she was able instead to force herself to say evenly, ‘Well, we can’t all want the
same things out of a relationship. And I’m very happy with Mark and what we have. Just as I’m very sure you’re
very
happy with Bebbie and what you have.’

She wished she could have reeled that last barb back in, but it was too late. Tate was leaning back, stretching out his legs. Cats scrunched themselves up to pounce, but his way of doing it seemed more disconcerting.

‘So, these sisters of yours,’ he said slowly, ‘what was it Fliss said they all did?’

She had expected more jibes about Mark. What trap was he laying now? And was he incapable of saying anyone’s name correctly?

‘Aurillia is a life coach and yoga teacher in an ashram—’

‘In California,’ Gilbert supplied.

‘Zin, well, she’s …’

‘A poet. Lives with two other poets on a houseboat in India.’ Gilbert put on a scandalised voice. ‘Both men. A
ménage à trois
.’

‘Must be a big houseboat,’ Tate said, with a wry grin. ‘And the other one: Serafina?’

‘She’s part of a theatre troupe.’

‘Mime,’ Gilbert mimed, then added, ‘all women.’

‘Well, there’s only so much mime a man can take,’ Tate agreed.

‘In the Philippines at the moment, aren’t they, Grace?’

She said they were.

‘Pretty exotic lifestyles there, Gracie,’ Tate said plucking up an olive and popping it in his mouth. She waited while he chewed, now knowing where this was going. ‘Exotic names, exotic jobs, exotic lifestyles.’ He shook his head as if bemused. ‘And you work for a company doing art tours, live in the city you were born in, have a boyfriend you don’t see a lot.’ A pause. ‘You adopted?’

‘No, just different,’ she said over Gilbert’s traitorous laugh. She tried to underline her nonchalance by reaching out for an olive, but Tate picked up the bowl and held it just out of reach and she felt too exposed to lean any further towards him.

‘You didn’t look so different on that beach,’ he said straight to her face. A simple statement, a matter-of-fact delivery, but she felt as if she could have tipped right off her chair and sprawled across the table.

‘Beach?’ she blurted, hearing the word screech up at the end. But at least she didn’t add,
What bloody beach, what the hell has Felicity shown you? Told you? Done?

She was so close to Tate at that moment and, like a pulse running between them, she could feel his urge to open her up and get to the heart of who she was. She saw him put the olive bowl back down on the table and imagined him reaching out and putting his hands on her shoulders
and pulling her into him, stroking her hair, murmuring that she should tell him everything, get it all out, it was all right. She remembered how he had got Bernice to unfold for him until she’d seemed drugged. A charmer. Another charmer, this time with disturbing green eyes and a backside just crying out for her to place her hands upon it.

‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ she said, sitting back but still imagining his hands on her shoulders, her hands on his backside.

‘The beach,’ he repeated. ‘Fliss showed me a photo of you and your sisters messing about on the sand. You must have been about sixteen. All looked like peas in a pod to me – all that wild hair.’ He let her stew a bit before saying pointedly, ‘What beach did you think I meant, Gracie?’

She was going to kill her mother. Kill her and sprinkle her ashes somewhere she’d hate, like between the pages of a dull and dusty annual report or, even better, Mark’s suitcase.

‘Grace had wild hair?’ Gilbert said, finally, finally doing something useful and breaking the tension. ‘I’ve never known anyone with hair as neat as Grace’s.’

‘Should have seen it, Gilb. Wild, long …’ Tate grinned. ‘Blonde as mine.’

She prised his hands from her shoulders, her hands from his backside. ‘It got darker as I got older,’ she said,
as if the topic bored her. ‘It became mousy, so I went even darker. I like the colour. I like it shorter and—’

‘Under control.’ Tate popped another olive into his mouth. ‘Dye your eyebrows too?’ he said after chewing it.

‘Where did you say your tour was this afternoon?’ she asked Gilbert.

‘Oh bugger.’ He was scrabbling for his watch. ‘Forgot about that. Better head off soon. Ten people to show around St Paul’s.’ He drained his wine and waved Hakan over, and when the bill was paid and they were all standing up to go, Grace made her apologies, saying she’d just remembered she had to rush and get something for her father, some crime magazine from the bookshop in the other direction. She’d see them, well, whenever they next popped into the office.

She caught the sceptical look Tate gave her as she briskly walked away, and once she was out of sight, she doubled back and cut down a different street. She snatched a glimpse of the two of them ambling along, Tate enthusing again, unwittingly forcing passers-by to step out of his way. All that burning energy.

Back at the office she made a detour into Far & Away. Bernice was alone and when Grace asked after Esther, it opened a floodgate of moaning. Esther had announced that she was off to Peru on an organised tour; she wasn’t
going to let her dream die. Bernice had helped her book it. Today she was taking a few hours out to go shopping for clothes. She’d be back soon, but even when she was in the office, she was worse than useless – either messing with her hair in the toilet or on the internet doing research.

‘And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when she does go,’ Bernice said, slamming down a brochure. ‘I’m goin’ to have to get Sol in to help a couple of days a week. I’ve had enough, I tell you. Soon as she’s back today, I’m giving myself an early finish. Rest while I get the chance. So say thanks very much to Blond Boy for putting ideas in her head.’ There was a sharp laugh. ‘Mind you, I’d be worried if I was him. Still waters, that Esther. She’s caught him twice already when he’s come down to nip out for a smoke. On him like a rash: “Oh Tate, can you advise me about hotels?” or “How hot will it be when I get to Machu Picchu?”’ Bernice’s impersonation of Esther’s rarely heard voice was spot on, but Bernice reverted to herself to say cynically, ‘Like she doesn’t know all that working here. Ask me, she’s more interested in how hot he is than Peru. She’ll be cramming him in her suitcase. You should see the way he leapt back up the stairs when she let him go. What do you think of these tie-backs?’