Exciting Times(46)
When it came to my turn to order coffee, I deleted the draft with an air of now having real business to attend to.
*
I told Miles about Julian’s take on the Li Hongzhang anecdote and he said it was the same reception Julian had given the tale when Miles had first told him it. Clearly Julian had feigned the same interest a parent would when their kid told them something they already knew – or had forgotten the story since Miles last told it, in which case his reactions were entirely predictable since he’d had the same one twice.
We sat on the roof terrace above Miles’s apartment. He shared it with the building’s other occupants, but today it was empty.
‘I do appreciate your coming to see me,’ said Miles. ‘Have more wine. I’ve had a bit of a head start on you.’
I wondered if most people’s relationships with their father more closely resembled mine with my dad, or mine with Miles. My entire verbal contact with Dad since moving to Hong Kong had been strings of ‘How are you getting on?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and how’s work?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and is it hot?’ and then back over to Mam. We couldn’t discuss politics because he’d say something awful about travellers or trans people and Mam would look at me like: don’t be hassling him. The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally.
‘I wanted to ask you about Julian,’ he said. ‘How do you think he’s getting on in London?’
‘Fine, I think. He likes his job.’
‘I’ll never understand him.’
‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘He was asking after you.’
Julian had probably asked Miles about me, too. I wondered what Miles might have told him. There surely wasn’t much he could say except that I was doing fine, and it would, I reflected, be unreasonable of Julian to extrapolate from this that I now had a girlfriend called Edith. Lots of people were doing fine and had no such girlfriend.
Miles said they planned to go to church some Sunday when Julian returned and I was welcome to join. They were Anglican, Miles said. My childhood impression was that Protestants sang a lot and were either more or less literal about wafers, depending how you saw it. Julian and Miles both had thick necks and voices whose timbre suggested a certain vim of throat. They’d be an asset come hymn-time.
I told Miles about mass in Ireland. My parents didn’t believe in God and were Catholic to boot (I explained this wasn’t contradictory, and was in fact the case for most Irish people), but Mam had made me go to the important services because if you didn’t you’d never be Mary in the nativity play. I was never Mary anyway. I fidgeted too much, and the mother of God surely kept her hands still or gainfully occupied, not twiddling her ponytail.
Clearly I had some potential as an actress, or I couldn’t simultaneously be Edith’s girlfriend and Julian’s whatever-the-hell-I-was. Edith’s girlfriend was honest about her feelings. Julian’s whatever-the-hell-she-was did whatever the hell she did. It was like the riddle with two doors and two guards, one who told the truth and the other who lied. And I had a privilege rarely afforded to stage professionals: I could choose which was a character, and which the real me. Could choose, as in no one else would choose for me – and couldn’t choose, as in couldn’t.
36
‘We need to do something about the apartment,’ Edith said in late July.
She began by leaving freesias and tulips in the hall with a note: put them in water or they’ll die. I’d given her what I thought of as the spare key, though it was really Julian’s. I wondered if Edith had taken this as a hint that I wanted her to reverse-burgle me with van der Bloom’s summer selection. I had no idea how real couples worked.
I put the bouquet in a vase I’d found in the cupboard, coated in dust so thick it felt like silt. Later I rang Edith. ‘I put them in water,’ I said. ‘They’re still dying.’
Next evening the flowers were gone and there were new ones I didn’t recognise. The tag said: ‘Tango Leucospermum, Kangaroo Paws, Scabiosa Pods, Eucalyptus, and in-season assortment’. I typed a message to Edith asking what the point was of being a banker’s moll if a year into it I was this unfamiliar with bouquets, then remembered sending it would be – probably – the worst idea ever.
I was a horrible person. I was living in one person’s flat, fucking someone else without telling them, and regretted my behaviour primarily on the grounds that it meant I couldn’t mock the first person with the second. But I had a mythologically beautiful girlfriend and a nice apartment to share with her. It seemed ungrateful to say anything that might reverse my luck.
‘I’m not keeping you in van der Blooms forever,’ Edith said. I’d complained the new flowers were dying, too.
‘Come on, big spender,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Take the AmEx.’
Like cross-pollination, our clothes went back and forth, her dresses in my wardrobe and my jumpers in hers. I saw her loafers in the hall and thought that if Julian saw them, the gig would be up. Then I remembered he’d think they were mine.
Really it all could be. Anything on his credit card might be something I was buying for myself. If his friends saw us together, it would be harder to persuade them we were fucking than we weren’t. I almost wished I were still in contact with Victoria so I could say: I have found a novel solution to the administrative challenges of cheating. But I hadn’t seen her in over two months now, and Julian had been gone nearly six.