Gravel Heart(36)

Marina only had eyes for handsome Robbie, who was easily the best actor in the cast. It did not make any difference. She was too beautiful for me and I was content to admire from a distance. She had thick black hair and bright brown eyes with a slatey glitter in them when she turned her head suddenly towards the light. While I was slouching in the wings at some point on the evening of the final dress rehearsal, Marina came gently up to me and without saying anything embraced me, fully and deeply. At that moment, as she held me close, her whole body pressed against mine, I guessed that she knew why I had gone to all those rehearsals. Then she lightly kissed my neck. After a moment she pulled back and I saw Robbie watching us, standing only a metre or so away. His eyes were venomous in that half-light, and I felt Marina start in my arms before she disengaged herself. That night Robbie played his part like a pimp in a rage and there was a scene after the performance. Marina avoided eye contact with me afterwards, and I slunk away to my guttersnipe place in the shadows without further protest. There was only one performance, to a parochial audience who knew the actors personally and sometimes laughed for the wrong reasons.

I dreamt longingly about that embrace and the suspended kiss that I think was about to follow. I knew I would always remember the moment and I fell even more deeply in love with Marina. Maybe I should have been braver, should have sought her out afterwards. Our doubts are traitors. There was a clue I was missing, some way of being that would allow me to carry out audacious acts without hesitation.

Basil and Sophie left that summer. We promised to write to each other, and I had to swear repeatedly that I would go and stay with them in Athens the following summer. As we parted, Sophie embraced me and said: I’ll never forget you, and I said: I’ll never forget you either. We remained in contact for a while after they returned to Greece, but then the postcards became irregular and slowly dried up.

*

I moved to a large house in Fiveways that I shared with five others, all foreign students. I heard about the room from another student who was working in Mark’s café. It was a dirty house and I thought it would be cold in the winter. The windows were loose and rattled in the wind. The carpets and rugs were threadbare scraps that were impossible to clean but which produced fibres and dust that gave all of us allergies, probably for life. The woodwork was damp and the whole house was enveloped in a powerful stench of rot that hit me like a diseased miasma when I entered, and I knew it was not good for any of us. But it could not be helped.

*

The café was busy, the pavement tables always full in the beautiful late-summer weather. Mark took on a new waiter because of the extra business, but he also said the café needed another young woman on the staff. It would be more reassuring and pleasing for the tourists to see another female waiter. That was when Annie came to work with us and put an end to my torment. To me she seemed a perfect Mark recruit. She was quick, always polite and helpful to the customers, chatty in the kitchen and never late. It was work she had done before and she was confident and relaxed about it. Mark put her on the pavement area, and Annie performed out there as if it was a stage, slipping between the tables and smiling at passers-by as they hesitated about coming in. By the end of her second day Mark smiled whenever he looked at her, even when she was not looking back.

Annie was slim, had a slightly round face, short brown hair, was of medium height, and was at that age when all of these features were in some kind of balance that was perfectly pleasing. But what made her even more attractive was the self-possession with which she moved around the café, never faltering or mishandling, her every movement certain, or so it seemed to me. Mark paid her warm attention, but that was his way with women when they started at the café. He flirted with them for a while as if he was practising his courtship skills, and when they knew they were loved, he turned down the volume without quite giving up the chat and left them to get on with their work. Business is business.

In any case, Annie had already made her own choice, and to my astonishment she had chosen me. She flashed me friendly smiles and came to me if she had a problem or a question she could not deal with. Once she put her hand on my arm as she spoke to me, and another time she leant against me briefly during a quiet moment. On the Saturday at the end of her first week, in the lull after the lunch crowd, she asked me what I was doing that evening.

I shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

‘I am going home and I’m going to make myself a carbonara,’ she said, her eyes open and frank and smiling. ‘Do you want to come and share it with me?’

‘I love carbonara,’ I said, laughing at how easy she made it for me.

It had been a long hot day but as we left the café a cool breeze blew in from the sea. I caught Mark’s eye as we left and there was a smile in it. We walked from the café because it was a nice evening and she only lived in Fountain Road, about twenty minutes away. Her face glowed with dried sweat, and her eyes were shiny with laughter and excitement. I don’t know what I looked like. Some short while into the walk she took my hand, and as we turned into Fountain Road she stopped on the pavement and kissed me, swelling her lips and opening them for my tongue. Her flat was on the third floor, and she opened her arms in a sweeping gesture, welcoming me in. It was still bright outside and a large window let in light on the living area. The bed was in an alcove around the corner, and she went there and I followed. She did not make a carbonara that night, instead we made love for hours. It did not feel like the first time, intuition telling me what to do when I would not have known before. In any case, she knew what she wanted and guided my mouth and my hands to what she desired. Later, she held on to me for a long time as we lay beside each other, our lips touching in long languid kisses. Yallah, I should have known it would be like this.